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eported cable capacity accounts for 11.3% of the total available fiber optic cable capacity, as of
December 31, 1999.
Note that cable capacity reported here likely understates the actual amount of capacity that is in use. For
example, this year’s reported cable capacity (activated and idle combined) is relatively small, only
accounting for 20% of total available (in operation) cable capacity. Due to the reasons cited in the
footnote, 7 we recognize that there might be substantial amount of cable capacities that are in use but
were not covered in our report. This discrepancy could also apply to satellite capacity since many
private satellite operators are marketing their capacity directly to end-users and were not subject to our
reporting requirements. 8 Table 7 also demonstrates the trend that most of the newly activated fiber optic
cables and especially the cables planned from 2001 and 2002, even with their initial capacity before
reaching maximum potential capacity, have far larger capacities than the older existing cables.
7 In the past, we have identified two reasons that caused the discrepancy between reported capacity versus available
capacity. One was foreign carriers' holding of the U.S. half of international cable capacity, about 20 to 25% of any particular
cable system. Those foreign carriers are not required to report their capacity under Section 43.82 unless they use their
capacity for the provision of U.S. international service. The other reason was the time-delay for country-specific information
for any new cable system. That could have caused another 30-40% of capacity to be under-reported. However, there is third
reason, which could cause a high level of unreported capacity. Under our Section 43.82, only common carriers are required
to report the use of their international facility. There are increasing numbers of new non-common carrier cables being built
and much of the capacity on those private cables was sold to end users, such as Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or to foreign
carriers. Under those circumstances, neither cable owners nor cable users were required to report those capacities used. For
example, in 1999, approximately 70% of total available capacity are from non-common carrier cables (see Table 7).
8 The calculation for total U.S. satellite available capacity is different from the calculation for total U.S. available cable
capacity. Due to the flexible nature of satellite coverage, each satellite can cover various countries and can be available to all
those countries within its footprint. Therefore, there is no way of calculating the fixed amount of capacity that can be
allocated to any given country at any specific time frame. On the other hand, fiber optic cables are fixed because they
deployed only to their planned cable stations, therefore, it is possible to calculate the total cable available capacity on a
particular route at any given time frame.
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