> On 11 Dec 2020, at 18:39, Stephen Wilcox <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> 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..

For TAT yes, for AC no. Global Crossing / AC was a financial play (but not 
financial traffic). Just not a very good one. But fundamentally that was built 
on the same premise.

> 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.

A lot of the large scale DC deployments are done, and the UK lost out. Mostly 
for completely other reasons than connectivity as connectivity is the cheap / 
easy part. But that train has left and as you say not destined for the UK.

- kurtis -

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Message signed with OpenPGP

Reply via email to