New EU States Well Connected

The expansion of the European Union has carriers focused on the potential for communications growth in the new eastern members. Two examples of this hit the news this week: See ETel's Expanding With Huawei and Interoute to Buy Euro Carrier.

As it happens, TeleGeography Inc. also picked this week to publish a study of supply and demand for international IP bandwidth in the region.

On the demand side, the study shows that the average IP bandwidth per user is 70 percent lower in the new EU states than in the rest of Europe, but the gap is closing. International backbone capacity to the 10 new members increased 293 percent between 2001 and 2003, compared with 167 percent in the original 15, according to Telegeography.

On the supply side, the study indicates oodles of spare capacity in the fiber backbones already installed between major cities, throughout the whole of Europe. The table below shows that only a small fraction of the lit capacity is currently being used in IP backbones, and that a lot of fiber hasn’t been lit yet.

Table 1:

	Amount of IP bandwidth (Gbit/s)	Capacity of lit fiber (Gbit/s)	Potential capacity of lit and unlit fiber (Gbit/s)	Number of Bandwidth Providers
Old EU Cities
London	550	9,515	276,530	33
Paris	399	9,240	254,790	24
Frankfurt	320	10,245	357,600	32
Amsterdam	267	8,140	253,440	24
New EU Cities
Prague	32	3,798	141,600	16
Warsaw	14	3,733	141,600	13
Budapest	13	3,413	148,800	13
Potential EU Cities
Bucharest	2	1,533	54,720	6
Sofia	0	353	23,040	3
Source: Telegeography, International Bandwidth 2004

— Nicole Willing, Reporter, Light Reading