Undersea Cables, Underwater No More

摘要

During the 1990s dot-com boom, phone companies spent more than $20 billion laying undersea fiberoptic cables from New York to London, through the Mediterranean, across the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and beyond. They were preparing for an expected explosion in internet traffic, but when the bubble burst at the turn of the millennium, operators unloaded cables for pennies on the dollar. That fiasco discouraged investment in the industry for the better part of a decade. Now, with data traffic surging-videos on Netflix and YouTube, songs from Spotify and Pandora, innumerable posts on Twitter and Facebook-the excess capacity has been absorbed, sparking another investment boom, with more cable laid in 2018 than in any year in almost two decades. The industry "is as strong as it's been since they all went bust," says Tim Stronge, vice president for research at telecom consultancy TeleGeography. "There's an awful lot of cable going in."