 is composed of private cross-border IP links deployed by over 450 ISPs worldwide. Their networks, when combined and scaled to capacity, define the global Internet capacity. Under recessionary economic influences, and the bursting of the dotcom bubble, the global Internet's expansion took a downturn in 2002. Since the introduction of the Web browser in 1994/95, international IP bandwidth deployment has more than doubled each year. But the growth rate of international Internet bandwidth slowed to less than 40% in 2002. 53 Europe, which accounts for 82% of the world's cross-border bandwidth, increased international capacity by 35%, a steep decline from 191% growth in 2001. Slowing Internet markets in Europe contributed most directly to the global deceleration of international Internet capacity growth, but developing markets also slowed. Asia's Internet bandwidth increased by 55% in 2002 compared to 122% in 2001, and Latin America's international Internet capacity slowed to 65% in 2002 after expanding from a low base by 471% in 2001. Advances recently in fibre optic transmission are due to reductions in cost per channel using multiplexing techniques in which light beams of different wavelengths are propagated over a single fibre, and termed wave division multiplexing (WDM). Using WDM, a transmission of 10 Tbps over one fibre was first demonstrated in 2001. 273 channels of 40 Gbps each using a 50 GHz channel spacing were transmitted over 117 km. 54 This is equivalent to INFRASTRUCTURE TO 2030: TELECOM, LAND TRANSPORT, WATER AND ELECTRICITY - ISBN 92-64-02398-4 © OECD 2006 2. TELECOMS INFRASTRUCTURE TO 2030 625 million voice channels at 16 kbps/channel. 10 such fibres could carry the traffic of everyone in the world speaking at once. Figure 2.11 shows development in WDM, and competing OTDM (optical time division multiplexing) up to 2003 with projected estimates of continued research following past performance, and assuming no major barriers and no sudden step change up by novel techniques. Two of the results of the WD