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TWST: Could you begin with a short overview of Asia Global
Crossing? Our focus is specifically on Asia. We're a pan-Asian
communications carrier focused on connecting the major business
hubs within Asia, and then of course connecting those back to the
rest of the world. What we've done at this point is complete a
fiber optic network connecting those major hubs. That network is
really one of the few that exists today, and we don't see anyone
else building any more in the near future, given the current
economic environment. That puts us in a unique position, because
we've built that network, and on top of that we've created a
broad set of services that we're offering to carriers throughout
the region, carriers throughout the world that want services in
that region, as well as to enterprise customers that want to
connect to these major hubs. Just to give you an idea and to take
a step back and talk a bit about what's going on in Asia, some of
the trends and observations of what is going on there in the
communications field, a lot of people today are talking about a
fiber or capacity overbuild. This is not the story in Asia, and I
want to emphasize that. Major connections between the hubs in
Asia are primarily subsea. You go from Tokyo to Hong Kong to
Singapore to Seoul to Sydney, and you're crossing oceans, not
land. And building subsea fiber optic cables between these hubs
is a big project; only a few of them have been built recently,
and therefore only a few have capacity today. This is, again,
very different from what you see in the United States, where tens
or more of networks have been built between the major cities. The
same is true in Europe, where, again, it's primarily terrestrial
builds. Asia is really leading the world in terms of broadband
deployment and growth. Korea is a perfect example. I think today
Korea is still the worldwide leader in terms of broadband
deployment. A trend that we have observed since we started doing
business there a few years ago is that the vast majority of
traffic is really starting in Asia and ending in Asia, or
originating and terminating within our footprint. From Asia
Global Crossing's point of view, about 90% of intra-Asian traffic
goes through hubs we cover. This is really a shift from historic
traffic patterns. One of the reasons for this is that before
networks like ours, through infrastructure simply did not exist.
So traffic hub and spoked through the United States. Another
reason for this is that a lot of the Asian content, which at one
point was created outside of Asia, particularly in the United
States, and then brought into Asia for the Asian markets, is now
essentially being created and stored within Asia.