About a decade ago, Huawei entered the business by setting up a joint venture with British company Global Marine Systems. It expanded its presence by laying short links in regions like Southeast Asia and the Russian Far East. But last September, Huawei surprised industry executives in Japan, the U.S. and Europe by completing a 6,000 km trans-Atlantic cable linking Brazil with Cameroon.
This showed Huawei has acquired advanced capabilities, even though it is still far behind the established players in terms of experience and cable volume.
During the 2015-2020 period, Huawei is expected to complete 20 new cables — mostly short ones of less than 1,000 km. Even when these are finished, Huawei’s market share will be less than 10%. Over the long term, however, the company could emerge as a player to be reckoned with.
The Nikkei Asian Review has an interesting article on Undersea cables — Huawei’s ace in the hole. My impression from Snowden leaks and other readings is that the US and UK have taps at a lot of the cable landing stations and that allows them to listen in on a large proportion of international internet traffic. If China starts building an alternative global network that could provide an alternative network backbone.