Undersea cable to avoid trouble spots

Database News - Wednesday December 19, 2007

BANDWIDTH

Undersea cable to avoid trouble spots

DON SAMBANDARAKSA

Indian telecommunications company VSNL has rolled out a US$200 million fibre optic cable that directly connects Singapore to Japan in a move it says will increase reliability by avoiding seismically active areas around Taiwan and cut transit times by precious milliseconds.

VSNL vice president for global carrier solutions, Byron Clatterbuck explained that the design is unique as it will have "fishbone" style forks into Vietnam, the Philippines and Hong Kong, but the main trunk will go directly from Singapore to Japan. In traditional deployments, the fibre would have to go onto and off each landing point, which is where problems most often occur in shallow waters.

VSNL also owns and operates the landing in Tohoyashi, Japan, which means that data going onward to Guam and North America can transit at Tohoyashi rather than have to make a detour to an exchange in Tokyo first, again reducing precious milliseconds in latency and reducing points of potential failure. Clatterbuck said that in total, customers using the new fibre can expect latency to drop by 10 to 15 percent because of all these design improvements.

One change in the industry is that more and more ISPs and corporations are no longer content at buying bandwidth from multiple providers, but now demand to know exactly where the cables are routed and which landing sites they pass through to ensure geographic diversity. The new cable is laid towards the north of Luzon island, as far away as possible from where the seismic activity that occurred two years ago on Boxing Day off Taiwan and left most of the region's Internet crippled.

The cable itself has four 96-lambda pairs of fibre optic cable. Each fibre pair can carry 960Gbps with current optical technology, or 3.84 terabits per second in total. Traditionally, fibre optic cables are designed to last 25 years, but many are retired at 15 years due to improvements in technology.

While a fork will branch into Vietnam, Clatterbuck noted that it is still a highly regulated country and the operations there are in partnership with a local company called EVN. VSNL does not have a licence to land in Vietnam.

Nor does VSNL have a partner in Thailand yet, which he said was similarly highly regulated. However, Thai ISPs and telcos can take advantage of VSNL's links to North America, typically using the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable to link from Bangkok to Hong Kong or Singapore before using VSNL's network to get to Los Angeles.

Fishing used to be a major problem but today cables are clearly marked on maps and fishing boats are asked to avoid them. "It's getting better in terms of education, but you still have areas like the South China Sea that is shallow and sandy, and a lot of cables get pulled there even with anchors," he said.

Bangkok Post