On Fri, 11 Dec 2020 at 17:38, Kurtis Lindqvist <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > > On 11 Dec 2020, at 16:02, Nick Hilliard <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Stephen Wilcox wrote on 11/12/2020 14:22: > >> There's no reason there should be - the UK terminates* cables from the > US and nominally Africa already which are not part of the EU or dependent > upon any UK EU law. > > > > At the moment this is true - most of the US-EU wet plant built in the > 1998-2003 time-frame terminated in the UK, but when Grace Hopper is > completed in 2022, it will only be the second americas-europe build with a > direct span to the UK in nearly 20 years. > > Not sure I would agree with this. TAT-14 lands in Denmark Netherlands and > France as well as the UK. When I used to work for a carrier we didn’t route > European traffic via the UK. The same is true for AC-1. Both of these where > the state of the art systems during the dotcom era. > > There IS a lot of traffic exchanged in the UK and some does pass through > for all kind of reasons but real word traffic paths are more complicated > than this, but yes with more wet capacity not even touching the UK then > there will be more direct paths. I am just not sure how much “visible” > traffic is really leaving the UK. > All true, but you need to look at why these were built this way and who financed them and for which customers.... - in the TAT era, before modern DWDM, capacity is running out, the Internet is growing exponentially, it was about connecting as many population centres together and sharing cost mostly with formerly incumbent telcos and capacity itself was the premium.. - skip to the Hibernia era and you have finance driving it, their last cable was entirely financed from financial traffic - now you see a lot of big tech, looking to connect their huge DCs with capex rather than opex, Dunant being one example Coming back to the original thread, cables can easily be landed in IE, UK, FR, even PT, follow the money if you want to predict the future - hint: all the big tech DCs are in Europe not UK, and growth areas (by %) are perhaps Africa, parts of Asia, but there may be other drivers coming up, but there needs to be a reason - altho the existing cables are old, there's a lot of them and upgrades are ongoing, only phasing out old cables when their cost exceeds what the capacity can be sold for. Unless there is a driver for tech in the UK, and that the UK is more compelling than say IE, NL, DE, the doubts expressed before will bear out, there needs to be investment, global or regional HQs, reasons for workers to come, ease of them coming, and reasons for infrastructure to be built and a regulatory and border framework friendly to that... and I don't see that in the news, I see fisheries, agriculture, manufacturing of goods. I remain skeptical. Steve
