As a Phoenix !

The submarine system market rebounds. We now for a while that it is a cyclical market, but if it was pretty grim for a while (since 2002), it is now looking pretty good. Operators need large pipes to answer the increasing demand for bandwidth, so the market is split in two segments: upgrades and new systems. Many existing undersea fibers are fine but they are old and driven by aging electronics. So they need to be reworked with new hardware that can pass more bits through the same fibers. As an example, GlobeNet, a 22,000-km system operated by Brasil Telecom, linking the US and Latam, will double its capacity in 1Q08, after upgrades performed by ALU. It is also the case for the Japan-US cable system, upgraded by Fujitsu, or the SeaMeWe 3 cable by ALU, or the Nautilus system in Mediterranean sea by ALU. But large new systems are a big part of the market revival. The Asia America Gateway system was won by a ALU+NEC consortium, the Sydney-Hawaii won by ALU the Atlas system by ALU, as well as the Gondwana 1 cable; the new FLAG undersea system was awarded to ALU+Fujitsu+NEC+ Tyco. That represents tens of thousands of km of new cables laid. A strong driver for laying new cables is to operate alternate physical routes, as demonstrating by the earthquakes off the coast of Taiwan this year that pinpointed that the best of our undersea cables are vulnerable. In total it is a substantial $1bn market of new business in the past six months; an amount not seen in undersea cable system for the past five years.