Whether negotiating areas of political conflict or tackling Arctic conditions, the telecoms industry is facing challenges on many fronts. Guy Matthews investigates the difficulties in reaching the world’s most geographically isolated communities.
“Wherever people live, broadband connectivity is the third or fourth thing they now require, after water and power,” believes Ian Douglas, managing director of the Telecoms Business Unit of Global Marine Systems, a major name in submarine fibre construction to all corners of the globe.The result, says Douglas, is that the range of work commissioned from Global Marine has been growing steadily wider over the past year or two, and its extremities more unusual and rarefied, as the world’s remoter human outposts demand and receive their own direct global connectivity. “We’ve done projects in Papua New Guinea and near the North Pole – neither of which we’d have dreamed of a few years ago,” he says. “It’s all driven by the fact that people with no broadband infrastructure have been used to getting what they want over satellite connections or microwave links, but that doesn’t cut the mustard any more....
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