SEACOM to improve redundancy

[BGE]

Cost. Laying one cable is cheaper than laying two. That would effectively have doubled the cost of the cable.

I understand it would be more expensive, another option would have been to lay 2 cables of the same capacity, each being half of the total capacity they have now... then both cables would be utilises all the time, with each acting as redundancy for the other... if you compare this scenario to other IT hardware costs, you always pay a premium for the highest capacity, latest technology... like with hard drives... a 1TB drive is often less than half the price of the equivalent 2TB drive... add to this the costs of buying capacity from a competitor during outage period... I'm pretty sure Telkom aren't paying nice...

Mr B

 

[Valerion]

I understand it would be more expensive, another option would have been to lay 2 cables of the same capacity, each being half of the total capacity they have now... then both cables would be utilises all the time, with each acting as redundancy for the other... if you compare this scenario to other IT hardware costs, you always pay a premium for the highest capacity, latest technology... like with hard drives... a 1TB drive is often less than half the price of the equivalent 2TB drive... add to this the costs of buying capacity from a competitor during outage period... I'm pretty sure Telkom aren't paying nice...

Mr B

Still not cheap. You have to pay for twice the amount of cable (number of repeaters, armouring, etc). Then pay twice the cost in laying the cable (have to be done twice - unless you can get a ship that can roll out two sets of cable at once). Perhaps you will need different equipment to handle this at the landing station, to provide automatic failover. Still MUCH more expensive than laying one cable.

This means you will probably have to charge about twice current rates to get the same profit, which means there's less incentive for customers to move over from SAT3/SAFE. And that impacts the business model you use to secure funding for the project. If you can't project a high enough return on the investment, people won't risk their money into laying the cable.