exportgoldman:freitasm: I don't think they will put only their money into this. They have to raise capital - they don't have $900 million dollars available at their fingertips. So at some stage they have factored the capital cost - and they will have to get that money back. This is going to be just one little bit of the total cost for this initiative.
From memory Southern Cross Cable paid off it's capital outlay in some ridiculous amount of time like 9 months or something (I should did up the actual time instead of offering inaccurate figures :) but it was well well worth it for Telecom and the other investors in SCC.
Didn't the recent upgrades of the SCC cable allow something like a 75% drop in costs to ISP's ? This was about a year ago ... I'm still waiting for a corresponding drop in my ISP costs ...