Pacific Fibre at SubOptic 2010
Mark Rushworth, John Humphrey and Laurent DuPlantie represented Pacific Fibre in Tokyo and Yokohama, Japan last week for the SubOptic submarine industry conference. It’s the key technical conference, held only every three years and everyone who is anyone in the industry (from over 120 countries) was there. The team met many of them, including a number of Kiwis and Australians who are deeply involved in the industry.
It was the perfect platform for John and Mark to meet customers, vendors and submarine cable specialists.
As Mark said:
“It was great to see the overwhelming support for Pacific Fibre from the industry. We were able to present the business case for Pacific Fibre, and we amazed at the response from vendors, customers and industry experts. It seemed like everyone wanted to help us make this happen.”
The team was impressed, and a little sad for NZ and Australia, with the free uncapped 75Mbps down and 65Mbps up broadband in the hotel. As Mark said “If there hadn’t been a fantastic conference on in the hotel with plenty of potential customers to see, it could have been very easy to stay in my room for the four days.”
Japan can enjoy all this cheap bandwidth because it has at least 19 cables heading out of the country. Also for a country that has been in recession for the last 20 to 30 years it was amazing to see the state of infrastructure and the wealth in the streets. They have the population, and vibrant export industry and a good focus on infrastructure as an enabler of economic success.
Our timing for Pacific Fibre is based on three things – the NBN and Ultra Fast Broadband network initiatives in Australia and New Zealand, the technology move to 40Gbits/sec per wavelength and the emerging ability for vendors to deliver a single cable from New Zealand to the USA. We should add SubOptic to the list, as attending helped our sales and technology efforts along considerably . Mark and the team were impressed with the quality of people and companies that they met, and made many promising customer engagements.
Next up Mark Rushworth and John Humphrey will be joined by Mark Kuper at the ITW conference in Washington DC next week. It’s the biggest conference of its type each year with over 4,000 attendees from 1,300 companies and 130 countries. The conference is the venue for meeting potential customers and capacity suppliers, and Pacific Fibre has a busy schedule planned.
