KEY POINTS:
Telecommunications executives, including a couple of lucky people from Telecom New Zealand have been debating the future of international broadband connections in Hawaii over the last few days at the Pacific Telecommunications Council's forum.
It must have been hard work stepping away from the beach and cocktails to think about fibre optic cables that snake under the sea to connect up the islands of the South Pacific.
Funnily enough though, that exact subject has been getting a lot of attention lately as plans are floated for numerous trans-Pacific cables, most significantly to us, Pipe Network's A$200 million link between Sydney and Guam.
As this Australian article explains, there's basically been a cosy duopoly in international connectivity to Australia for years, with the Southern Cross Cable Network and the Australia Japan Cable dominating and keeping prices high.
Pipe plans to arrive in 18 months time with a third link taking traffic up past Indonesia to the Northern Pacific where it can easily be handed off to Asia and sent across the Pacific to the US. A third player will hopefully break the strangehold the two players currently have on the market and Pipe's arrival will only make a second trans-Tasman cable more feasible.
But if the PTC's members are correct, the extra capacity being added with various Pacific cables in the works will be desperately needed to meet the surging demand for data-heavy internet applications.
As PacNet CEO Bill Barney told the conference in Hawaii (as quoted by CommsDay):
"If you look across the board you're still seeing bandwidth growth in the 70-80 per cent range," he said. "This was in 2007. This is phenomenal growth... if you were to take all the capacity today in the [APAC region], if you look at what's happened in 2006 and 2007, we'd actually run out of bandwidth in 2011. The truth of the matter is it's going to happen at some point, we actually will go through all the bandwidth we have in the world today."
It's also plain to see that companies that make their living selling international connectivity are nervous about the very real prospect of well-heeled internet companies like Google and Skype buying their own international cables.
This from iBasis CEO and president Ofer Gneezy: "Let's say Google starts doing voice services, and they don't charge you anything for using the voice service but they make their money out of advertising, most carriers would find this a complete destruction of their business model.
"In the case of Google, communications becomes a source of revenue but the revenue is not from voice, the revenue's from advertising. I think a model ike this would be very disruptive for carriers that...do retail services themselves.
"It's inevitable. If you look at Yahoo!, they have voice services, EBay has voice services, every internet property has voice services."
Indeed they do, which means the cable layers are likely to be busy for years to come as more fibre optic is strung along the ocean floor.
