Wall Street, PTC 2008, High Surf and Trans-Pacific Internet

Written by Howard Dicus - hdicus@kgmb9.com

January 14, 2008 11:48 AM

Blog: www.kgmb9.com/howard Part I: Buckle your seat belts, it could be a bumpy ride on Wall Street this week. No fewer than four giant financial companies report earnings and losses this week, including JP Morgan Chase and Merrill Lynch. New York media think Merrill Lynch will write off another 15 billion dollars -- and this morning CNBC says Citicorp will write down 24 billion. That's big money even on Wall Street! The Pacific Telecommunications Council annual conference is underway at Hilton Hawaiian Village. Telecoms executives from around the world convene here every January to discuss the future and make announcements. One of those announcements is a new fiberoptic network coming to Hawaii. I'll have details later in this half hour. High surf has meant high economic times for the top side of Oahu. I went to the North Shore yesterday morning to check things out and saw busy restaurants and shops. Big waves drive the North Shore's economy, not so much because of surfers as because of gawkers, the second group being more numerous.  Part II: Hawaii -- already one of the best-connected spots on the Internet -- is going to get yet more trans-Pacific cable connections. French Polynesia will pay more than 100 million dollars to the telecoms giant Alcatel-Lucent to lay fiberoptic cable from Tahiti to Hawaii, the first land-based broadband connection between French Polynesia and the rest of the world. Until now it has relied on expensive satellite connections. Alcatel-Lucent is one of the largest players in the world of telecoms. Alcatel stems from the French national telephone company and Lucent is the former Bell Labs. The nearly 3,000-mile network will be able to transmit all the data in the human genome in a fifth of a second -- 10 gigabits per second on each of 32 channels. The network is scheduled for completion in 2010. Alcatel workers are on Oahu now scouting for locations for landfall. Hawaii is already connected by two Asia-America fiberoptic networks plus Southern Cross, which has two lines to North America, one from New Zealand and one from Australia, both of which pass through Hawaii. It was also recently announced that a new network from Asia to America will also make landfall here.

Last Updated ( January 14, 2008 11:48 AM )