We have been, officially, persuading the deployment of terrestrial optical fiber along the Asian Highway since 2011. Our point is very simple: Asian countries, unlike the ones in Europe, are interlinked exclusively through submarine cables. Deployment and maintenance of undersea networks keep Asia’s bandwidth manifolds pricier than Europe’s. As a result, the consumers of developing Asia cannot afford broadband.
TeleGeography’s global bandwidth prices at major market places have been central to our argument for a pan-Asian cross-border fiber network. ESCAP, the UN agency that fosters Asian Highway, has listened to us and engaged Terabit Consulting to study the state of broadband across Asia. Terabit has also examined the affordability of broadband in ASEAN-9, North and Central Asia and South and West Asia regions. It has strongly corroborated our recommendation of laying fiber along the Asian Highway.
Meanwhile, a latest study of TeleGeography has further solidified our argument for Asian Highway.
However, price levels vary by region and between terrestrial and subsea deployments. Upgrades to 100Gbps equipment on terrestrial networks have been rapid in recent years as bandwidth demand has increased, and European and intra-US terrestrial routes exhibit the lowest 100Gbps prices globally. Between Q2 2014 and Q2 2015, median prices on the Frankfurt-London and Chicago-New York routes fell 24% and 12%, respectively, to USD12,412 and USD29,250 per month.
On longer subsea routes, where many providers are just beginning to offer 100Gbps service, wavelength leases are more expensive. In Q2 2015, the median 100Gbps price on the London-New York route was USD54,000 per month, after decreasing 16% over the past year. Meanwhile, the median price of a 100Gbps wavelength between Los Angeles and Tokyo fell 12% to USD110,000 per month.
Full report of TeleGeography is here.
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