What Level 3 has done it's built a network that can be shared by all of these users by simply purchasing a lower cost solution from Level 3. The traditional telecommunications companies -- even the new entrants -- can benefit from the low-cost solution that Level 3 built in to the network infrastructure when it was constructed.
TT: What businesses in Taiwan will benefit the most from expanded capacity?
Liddell: We are very much focusing on those customers who have what we call telecommunications intensive usage. They can be the carriers, they can be the Internet providers but not the end users themselves. We want to sell to lots of those companies, we're a horizontal company, we'd prefer to sell our services to multiple companies rather than just compete with those companies.
TT: How does continuing innovation in devices that allow mobile access to the Internet boost business for a company like Level 3?
Liddell: The demand for access to information over an IP platform is growing in all sorts of shapes and forms be it WAP, be it 3G be it ADSL cable modems all of these technologies are simply alternatives, choices for end users to be able to access the Internet to pull down content to communicate. Level 3 as a company is a provider of large capacity services to those providers. So any number of innovations on how end user can access information in our view are all good things.
TT: The severance of a submarine cable linking China and the US in February seriously degraded Internet access to millions. How does Level 3 deal with issues of cable security?
Liddell: I think it highlights the need for additional submarine cables. The cable break you referred to illustrates one of the most critical problems in the industry which is each new cable delivers a lot more capacity because each new generation has a lot more bandwidth availability. When you're very dependent on one cable system and that cable system breaks it can bring the Internet to a grinding halt, as it did here in Taiwan.
That is a very strong argument for allowing investment by companies into additional alternative submarine cable systems such as the Tiger cable system.
The way in which the industry now builds submarine cables to avoid these problems is to build them in a ring configuration.
So that's a second factor, building the submarine cable such that if one segment of that cable breaks then traffic is restored on another segment. We do that and we certainly expect our competitors to do that. Secondly we chose to land our submarine cables in locations that are less prone to those kinds of problems.
For example one of the reasons for the recent break between the China and US was due to fishing vessels off the coast of China.
We have no intention of taking that route simply because we believe that route is prone to that kind of damage. We've chosen to land our cable in Toucheng which is away from from any heavy fishing and marine activity.
When we land our cables we do something called deep trenching which means we physically bury them under the ocean floor. All of these factors are built into the tiger system to avoid these kind of problems.
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