Undersea Upgrades Abound at Global Crossing

International fiber and data provider glbc announced a series of upgrades to its undersea infrastructure today.  According to the company, the moves come in direct response to traffic growth across the board internationally but most specifically into and out of South and Latin America.  In order to keep up, Global Crossing is adding capacity to:

• MAC – The Mid-Atlantic Crossing cable that connects New York to Florida and the Virgin Islands.
• PAC – The Pan-American Crossing cable that cuts through Panama and connects Central America and the Carribean to the west coast of the USA and to various transpacific cables.
• SAC – Which connects to both MAC and PAC and encircles most of South America, while making a short land detour across the Andes rather than go all the way around Cape Horn.

I guess we know where Global Crossing’s improved cashflow is going toward this year, eh?  While the previously announced AC-1 upgrades focus on Europe, everything else today implies that traffic growth in Latin America is real and not going away.  It helps of course that there just aren’t that many cables hooking up the region, which means that the growth may actually be profitable.  You know, unlike how transatlantic traffic exploded for 10 years while pricing imploded even faster.  In this case, we have the growth but no crippling oversupply problem.

Yet anyway.  When the credit markets free up, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see another cable get laid.  But not any time soon, and given the years it would take to plan and build one I would say that Global Crossing’s is happy to have to upgrade theirs.  They have some room to run with it.

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Categories: Internet Backbones · Undersea cables