Columbus crosses Atlantic again

By STEPHEN HARDY

Following up on a memo- randum of understanding signed in April 1997, an international consortium of more than 30 telecommunications companies signed a construction and maintenance agreement to build the Columbus iii transatlantic submarine fiber-optic cable system. The new system, scheduled to be online by July 1999, will have the capacity to carry more than 20 times the signal traffic of its predecessor, Columbus II.

Southern Europe to U.S. link

Columbus iii will link southern Europe with the United States. The 10,000-km cable will run from Mazara, Italy, to Conil, Spain; Lisbon, Portugal; Ponta Delgada, the Azores; and terminate in Hollywood, FL. Three companies--Tyco Submarine Systems Ltd., Morristown, NJ; Alcatel Submarine Networks, Paris, France; and the Pirelli Cables and Systems S.p.A. affiliate Maristel, Milan, Italy--will share the $236 million contained in the supply contract issued by the consortium. Tyco will serve as the lead contractor and will supply all of the system`s terminal equipment. It will also provide the cable, repeaters and marine services for the cable system`s western segment. Generally, Tyco provides equipment and cable of its own manufacture, although Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, NJ, frequently provides fiber. The company had not returned phone calls by press time to confirm the equipment configuration envisioned for the new system.

Columbus iii will consist of two optical-fiber pairs. Each pair will operate initially at 2.5 Gbits/sec per wavelength. With full path redundancy in each direction, initial capacity will total 10 Gbits/sec, the equivalent of approximately 120,000 simultaneous calls. The system will be designed with a total capacity of eight wavelengths per fiber pair, which will carry an aggregate 40 Gbits/sec using wavelength-division multiplexing.

Among the more notable of the carriers involved in the Columbus iii consortium are at&t, mci International, Telecom Italia, Telefonica de Espana, TresCom, and Companhia Portuguesa Radio Marconi.

Crowded ocean

The Columbus iii announcement comes hard on the heels of a spate of cable system announcements from Global Crossing Ltd., Bermuda--some of which overlap the service areas expected to be covered by Columbus iii. The first of these is the Mid-Atlantic Crossing, which will link the Brookhaven, Long Island, NY, landing point of the Atlantic Crossing-1 (AC-1) cable with Bermuda. From there, the system will link to points in the Caribbean, to Florida, and then to New York. The other network, called Pan-American Crossing 1, will land in Mexico and other parts of Central America.

The question arises whether Columbus iii will compete with these systems as a gateway between Latin America (through the Hollywood, FL, landing point) and Europe--as well as its position versus Global Crossing`s AC-1 system.

"One thing that Columbus iii does is that it goes to southern Europe, which the northern transatlantic cables do not," offers Tom Soja, managing director of T. Soja and Associates, an analysis and consulting firm based in Brookline, MA. Global Crossing is one of Soja`s clients. "I guess it also provides a convenient transit route from the Latin American countries. Although, having said that, the Mid-Atlantic Crossing cable project that is under development right now could theoretically do the same sort of thing for the Latin American countries, because it will pick up cables like Maya and Pan-American and Americas II and the various landing points in Florida and the Caribbean--namely, St. Thomas and St. Croix. And it could transport that traffic northward to the western landing of AC-1 in Brookhaven, Long Island, and transit over to Europe on probably less expensive capacity than Columbus iii."

Soja says that the fact that Columbus iii is not a ring system may hurt it competitively. However, he points out that it may be possible for the system to link with such other cable networks as Americas II and Atlantis II to provide "somewhat of a ring" to provide increased protection from service outages due to cable breaks. q