Carriers follow Pan-European trend

It's beginning to look like any international carrier that hasn't started putting together a Pan-European network soon will be an outcast, as Cable & Wireless and Qwest Communications last week joined the fray.

C&W announced a near-term plan to build a 155 Mb/s network connecting 10 cities and a five-year project to connect a total of 40 cities over dark fiber leased from Global Crossing. Qwest announced that it would build a fiber optic European network with Dutch telecom company KPN that will link to Qwest's North American network.

C&W will lease capacity on the Gemini trans-Atlantic cable to extend the Internet backbone network it acquired from MCI into Europe. MCI WorldCom, which retained WorldCom's Internet business and-along with C&W-is among the three dominant players in the Internet backbone market, recently made a similar move.

How will these new links affect the flow of global Internet traffic? Currently only 30% of European Internet traffic stays in Europe. The remaining 70%, including traffic destined for Asia and even some traffic that ultimately ends up back in Europe, flows into the U.S.

C&W's initial strategy may not change that much. The company expects to offer direct access into U.S. peering points for its customers, said David Wickham, the U.K.-based chief executive of C&W's global network. But, he added, "in the fullness of time, we'll see more peering for intra-European connectivity, maybe with the major players and with European Internet providers such as Ebone. Instead of hauling traffic over the Atlantic, we'll also see more caching and mirroring on our side."

Even with the planned expansion, MCI WorldCom's network will be more sophisticated than C&W's, said Robert Cohen, president of Cohen Communications Group.

Wickham countered that C&W's strong presence in Asia provides a geographic advantage.

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