How long does a glut last? If you cast your mind back, you may remember that companies splurged on bandwidth and optical fibre on fantastical notions of data demand that were never likely to be met in a profitable timescale. That glut has now been reached and it looks like the feast of 2001 could turn into the famine of 2014 for transatlantic bandwidth.
During the dot-com boom, so many undersea cable delivering the Internet
traversed the bottom of the ocean between the U.S. and Europe that
bandwidth prices plummeted and providers of submarine cables filed for bankruptcy.
But those cables may soon no longer be enough to satisfy the global
demand for bandwidth between the two continents, according to research out today from TeleGeography.
The research firm estimates that bandwidth requirements will grow 33
percent between 2008 and 2015, and trans-Atlantic capacity will be
exhausted by 2014.
One suspects that bandwidth could follow the same fate as oil refineries: less investment to raise prices.