The Wide World of Networks

Want to tour all the world's most exotic locales? You might consider going into the fiber optic cable business. 

From the remote villages of Greenland to the west coast of Africa, the Suez Canal and the Himalayas, telecom companies are busy laying cable to enable better Internet communications at a pace not seen in a good seven years, the Wall Street Journal reported last week. 

Seven years ago, many of you might recall, was the time of a crushing bust for the telecom industry which, it was said, grossly overestimated the world's need for cable and kept building its way into a glut. The companies responsible for this overexpansion suffered a collective $2 trillion loss in stock market capitalization.

Yet here we are not even a decade later and guess what? All that "excess capacity" is not only being used regularly but is strained to meet the demand for Internet service in many regions of the world, like the Middle East, which was recently the site of four major cable outages that disrupted Internet connections from Egypt to India. 

Even as recently as seven years ago, when the Internet was a ubiquitous work tool and rapidly being adopted in the home, few people could have predicted the pace at which our demand for connectivity would grow. 

The upcoming 2010 World Cup in South Africa, for instance, is the impetus for a frenzied cable expansion throughout the African continent. And the 57,000 residents of Greenland are now connecting to the Internet in volumes that far exceeds that country's satellite capacity. The government there is investing some $130 million to lay cable connecting it to Iceland and Newfoundland.

So what is the lesson from all these far-flung places? I think there are a couple.  One, while YouTube and MySpace feel thoroughly "American", the explosion in Internet usage is a global phenomenon with global significance.  And, whether you make your connection on a desktop, a laptop or a wireless device, somewhere there are heavy duty wires and cables making that connection possible. That requires hefty investments, lots of labor, and, if we want to avoid massive outages in the future, foresight and planning.