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Entrepreneur Plans Next-Generation Net for Whole World Neil Tagare, president of New Jersey-based CRT Group, says he'll build a new high-speed fiber optic network that links the whole world and brings underdeveloped countries into the global marketplace. By Susan Dumett, ABCNews.com Start Date: 12/05/98 Neil Tagare wants to wire the countries the information age has left behind. The 37-year-old entrepreneur and president of the New Jersey-based CTR Group plans to build the largest, most flexible high-speed fiber optic network in the world and bring underdeveloped countries into the global marketplace. Dubbed "Project Oxygen," the network will ultimately link every continent except Antarctica. Stretching more than 104,160 miles, the network will link 78 countries at 99 landing points. Its cables will be capable of carrying more than 25 million phone calls or 10,000 streaming video channels simultaneously. This high-speed information pipeline promises to blur the line between the Internet and traditional telecommunications. And its backers say it will cut costs so dramatically that geography and distance will become irrelevant factors in the price of global communication. "This is next-generation Internet," predicts Tagare. Electronic communication, he insists, will soon combine video and data. And as the builder of the newest backbone to carry that information, Tagare boasts, "Project Oxygen will have as much impact on the Internet as the creation of the Internet itself." Wiring the Planet If Tagare's global vision seems bursting with hubris, consider this: He has already wired the planet once. Before founding CTR Group (the initials stand for Concept to Reality), he spearheaded the Fiber Optic Link Around the Globe, also known as FLAG. That landmark project, led by New York-based Nynex Corp., was a privately funded submarine network with 15,360 miles of cable. Tagare did the preliminary studies for the project, then negotiated almost all of FLAG's 13 landing party agreements. He also cut the deals enabling carriers from more than 60 countries to use the network. Through that project, Tagare says, he became increasingly aware of the benefits people in both Western and non-Western countries might experience by telecommuting and video-conferencing on an international network. He left Nynex in 1995 to pursue Project Oxygen. "Project Oxygen is going to change the way people work," Tagare predicts. "Trans-oceanic telecommuting is going to be big business three to five years from now. We call it electronic immigration." Although Project Oxygen is expected to be seven times the size of FLAG, Jack Kessler, an analyst and former employer, believes Tagare can pull it off. Kessler heads Kessler Marketing Intelligence (KMI), a Newport, R.I., research firm specializing in fiber and cable. He remembers when Tagare, who was educated in Mumbai, India, before attending graduate school in the United States, called and asked for an analyst's job at KMI. "I told him no positions were available." The way Kessler tells it, Tagare responded, 'Look, let me come up and meet you. If you're not interested, I'll pay for my airfare and accommodations.' "When I met with him, he said, 'If you hire me you won't be sorry.' We did and we weren't." Within six months Tagare had brought in so much money that his salary doubled. These days some big players are also willing to show Tagare the money. Investors including J.P. Morgan, Corning, NEC and Mitsui have put money into Project Oxygen in exchange for equity ownership in the network. And the price tag isn't cheap. The project, scheduled for completion in 2003, will cost $10 billion. Too Much of a Good Thing? With so much cable in place already, some critics argue that Project Oxygen will only create a glut of capacity. That, the critics argue, will force carriers to charge customers less for long distance calls and will make it difficult for CTR to cover building and maintenance costs. But Rob Rich, senior vice president of telecommunications for the Boston-based Yankee Group, an industry research and analysis firm, thinks it will have the opposite effect. "When prices drop," Rich says, "it will stimulate demand for things like video-conferencing and telemedicine multimedia communication that requires the transmission of huge files." Once Project Oxygen is complete, it may take some time for the computer hardware and software to catch up with the ability to move information so quickly. Once computers catch up, Rich says, "look out. All of this capacity will actually take the whole world -- not just select countries -- to next-generation communications."
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