ed at the same rate. This has enabled the growth of the Internet, one part of the global fibre network. But all growth is highly dependent on economic circumstances, and (over-) availability of capacity. INFRASTRUCTURE TO 2030: TELECOM, LAND TRANSPORT, WATER AND ELECTRICITY - ISBN 92-64-02398-4 © OECD 2006 2. TELECOMS INFRASTRUCTURE TO 2030 A critical element of that global backbone is the world's ever expanding network of submarine fibre optic cables. Over the past decade, the increased demand for bandwidth driven by the Internet, as well as the continuing international trend of privatisation of national telecommunications industries, has outstripped by far the resources offered by satellite transmission of voice and data. 49 Instead, the fraction of transoceanic voice and data transmitted over undersea cables has grown in the past 12 years from 2% to as high as 80% in 2000. 50 As demand has grown, SO have the numbers of cables on the seabed. Geostationary satellites have progressed for long distance transmission but their cost, limitations, reliability and delay over geostationary orbits has left them as a redundancy backup for WDM fibre. A key market for study of long distance infrastructure economics is the transatlantic traffic (TAT) market with its multiple generations of cables being the milestones of its evolution. The first optical cable was TAT-8 in 1988, with 1)*280 Mbps PDH capacity. 51 Currently TAT-12/13/14 are all in service. The typical price for a complete system (cables, repeaters, equipment at the landing points, all marine operations) has always seemed to stabilise at about USD 500-600 million, despite falls in dollar prices of equipment and increase in performance. In the initial forecasts made by the TAT-8 consortium it was expected that the cable capacity would be filled by the year 2000 - it was filled in 1990, six times faster than foreseen. TAT-14 entered service in 2001, expanding capacity more than .000 times that of TAT-8 in the 12 years since its launch. 52 The international Internet