ew and upgraded undersea cables is growing due to the increasing amounts of video and data traffic on the Internet and between enterprises. In 2009, 16 new systems were completed and eight additional systems were finished in 2010. For the most part, carriers such as Tata Communications (headquartered in India), Verizon Communications, and AT&T, Inc., participate in consortiums that build undersea cables. The carriers reserve exclusive use of some fibers in the cable system for their own international traffic rather than paying other carriers to transmit it. This assures them adequate capacity. They also offer space on these cables to other carriers on a wholesale basis. But this is not their primary motivation for constructing these cabling systems. An exception to this model is the new undersea cable on the east coast of Africa, which was built exclusively for the wholesale market. Most undersea cables on the east and west coasts of Africa are built by consortia made up primarily of local African carriers and a smaller number of international carriers. Each undersea cable system has drop-off points at multiple cities. Early systems, constructed in the 1990s, provided only shore-to-shore service, from one shore of ocean to its other shore. Undersea cable operators now generally provide city-to-city service. As part of a package, they transmit the traffic from one major city, through the undersea cable, and then overland to cities on the remote end of the undersea cable over their own fiber networks. Figure 4-1 depicts an example of just such a system. A cable that spans the Atlantic Ocean between Europe and the United States can carry traffic to a co-location site where many carriers have routers. One of these co-location sites is on Eighth Avenue in New York City. At the co-location facility, multiple carri- ers interconnect their networks and carry one another's traffic to other cities. The consortia that fund new transoceanic cables are typically made up of around six investors. A consortium usually includes b