As Travel Costs Rise, More Meetings Go Virtual – NYTimes.com

As travel costs rise and airlines cut service, companies large and small are rethinking the face-to-face meeting — and business travel as well. At the same time, the technology has matured to the point where it is often practical, affordable and more productive to move digital bits instead of bodies.

The emerging trend, analysts say, goes well beyond a reaction to rising travel costs and a weakening economy. “These technology tools are going to change the way corporations think about travel and work in the long run,” an analyst at Forrester Research, Claire Schooley, said.

Past predictions that technology could replace travel have been frequent and premature. The main difference today, analysts say, is that the technology is finally catching up to its promise. No single breakthrough explains the progress, but rather a series of step-by-step advances — and steady investment — in telecommunications networks, software and computer processing.

It has a lot of high-end hotel rooms, but the USP of the tourist industry there is not business travel, it is utter and complete relaxation.  And relaxed people are not known to generate lots of data and voice traffic.

All this is relevant to the question of what will go through the two cables landing in Maldives by 2007.  Reliance/FLAG is already live, I believe.
Maldives did not switch to education in Dhivehi like Sri Lanka did, and as a result they have a significant population of young people ready to work in BPOs. So is it possible that Maldives is investing in cables in order to go into BPOs in a big way? Perhaps, some Sri Lankan or Indian entrepreneurs should get a running start . . .

One would also hope that all this construction will have some effect on the prices of IPLCs out of Colombo [international private leased circuits]. My understanding is that SLTL’s IPLC prices are many multiples higher than those offered by Indian vendors. Unless prices come down, the cables can be built, but will they come?

LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE – LBO

A 20 million dollar joint venture with Sri Lanka Telecom and Dhiraagu Telecom of Maldives, the 850 kilometre cable is due to be commissioned in the first quarter of 2007.“This cable has a 10 Gigabit capacity, but it can be expanded to 1 terabit because there is a possibility that we can connect to the African side, via Maurtius, Ascension Islands, Madagascar and also South Africa,” Suhei Anan Chief Executive of Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT) told Lanka Business Online shortly after a cable laying ship set off towards the Maldives from the West coast of Sri Lanka.