Fueled by an ever-growing demand for bandwidth, traffic on intra-Asian submarine cable systems will rise 39 percent annually over the next six years. These routes, reports TeleGeography in its Global Bandwidth Forecast Service, will require an additional 99 Tbps of lit capacity to satisfy service provider's needs.
Serving this bandwidth demand will be systems that still have a lot of unused capacity in addition to three new cable consortium systems--the Asia Submarine-cable Express (ASE), the Southeast Asia Japan Cable (SJC), and the Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) system--which are set to begin offering services by 2014.
TeleGeography says that as these new cable systems come into operation, service prices will drop "rapidly" between 2012 and 2014. The monthly lease price for 10 Gbps wavelengths between Hong Kong and Tokyo, for example, will decline 27 percent annually, from $42,500 per month in 2011 to $16,400 per month by 2014.
Of course, ongoing demand will enable buyers to get larger volume discounts that could take a toll on service provider revenues. Even though service providers that operate these systems could see revenue rise again in 2015, "the compound growth rate from 2011 to 2018 could remain negative."
For more:
- TeleGeography has this report
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