 OECD, OECD Web site: www.oecd.org/dataoecd/60/47/35527500.xls. market and large business networks. New entrants such as COLT, Level 3 and Global Crossing expanded in an era of apparently unending infrastructure demand, financed in the dotcom boom and the corresponding telecoms boom by large bank borrowings. Discovering the true extent of the surplus is extremely difficult, as there is high interest in maintaining a silence over excess "dark" fibre. The situation is complicated by the lack of industry consensus on whether dark fibre should be measured as part of the total stock of available fibre - some have argued that because it still requires investment to light dark fibre it should be excluded from consideration of available capacity. However the costs in laying fibre may be one or two orders of magnitude greater than lighting it. So just where are the gaps in today's infrastructure? Turning first to the big growth sector, mobile, we see that the new 3G technology based on the 3GPP standards is currently not seeing the success expected in 1999 - a period of exuberant expectations - and so many operators are now relying on 3G technology upgrades. Back in 1999, the initial 3GPP standards were near completion and investments were amassed to buy licences in the first rounds in the United Kingdom and Germany in 2000. What has been delivered is a technology, not a service, with high cost and relatively low bandwidth (2 Mbps) and 3.5G upgrades to HSDPA (High speed downlink packet access) and HSUPA (High speed uplink packet access) being required for assured 2 Mbps working. Currently, Vodafone is growing at one million 3G customers per INFRASTRUCTURE TO 2030: TELECOM, LAND TRANSPORT, WATER AND ELECTRICITY - ISBN 92-64-02398-4 © OECD 2006 2. TELECOMS INFRASTRUCTURE TO 2030 quarter; at that rate it would take over 40 years for Vodafone's global customer base of around 165 million customers to convert to 3G. 19 However, some note that it is possible to compare the situation with the early months of 900 Mhz GSM, when onl