Arkady Matkovsky, TTK vice president for international public relations, examines the need for network diversification to cope with international cable cuts… 

The situation today
Globally, the Internet is connected by over 500,000 miles of undersea cables which provide access to all continents. Prior to 2007, end users were largely unaware that the e-mails they send to the Dubai office or the phone calls they place to friends and relatives overseas more often than not travel undersea. If they were, they probably didn’t know the extent to which the cables carrying this information were prey to severing by the anchors of fishing or cargo ships, seismic activity or even shark attack.

But following six subsea cables breakages in the Mediterranean Sea and Persian Gulf between then and now, each drastically reducing capacity between Europe and the Middle East , they are only too aware of how fragile the main networks keeping lines of voice and data communications open really are. Worse, the delays in repairs have made them less, not more, understanding of breaches of QoS guarantees. And in July 2009 there was a further subsea cable outage that virtually cut off Nigeria entirely from the rest of the world.

If the four submarine outages in the Mediterranean Sea and Persian Gulf that occurred between January and February 2007, reduced capacity between Europe and Middle East by 76% (Telecom Asia, March 2008), what will be the toll of this latest incident?

Unsurprisingly, global telecommunications operators are looking with increasing urgency for ways to safeguard the communications they are entrusted with as a way to continue to hold and win market share from their rivals. More than this, they are under increased scrutiny in these economically challenging times as not just consumers but businesses depend on them every hour of every day and so, ultimately does the financial recovery of the entire world. So just how will they be able to accomplish this?

Global Telecom Pioneers
In examining our telecommunications future, it is instructive to see where we have come from: in 1988, the fibre-optic cable TAT 8 was opened, connecting the USA with UK and France and opening a new era of ‘unlimited’ bandwidth between those powerful economies. According to The Undersea Cable Report 2008 presented by Terabit Consulting, the total length of submarine cable deployments of any kind across the globe at the time of TAT 8 had reached one million km.

Today, that represents only around 1% of the total length of fibre-optic cables installed around the world: more than one billion km at the end of 2008. Of these, about 30% of terrestrial fibres provide long-distance connections, while most cables are used to enable different types of local access to the networks.

It seems obvious given the current geographical distribution of the continents – not to mention recurring cable cut problems that both dry and wet long-distance infrastructures are needed for effective global data transit. Yet for a long time country boundaries and closed national telecom markets presented massive obstacles for wider integration of terrestrial and submarine backbone networks.

The liberalisation of telecom markets that changed all this began in America and Western Europe in the 1990s, and made possible the integrated communications model that opened up the countries of the world for business with each other. Transit routes between Europe and Asia were soon constructed through the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and by the beginning of the 21^st Century telecom markets had started to open up in Russia , China , India and many other countries known today as emerging markets.

Drivers were manifold, but chief among them were the desire for both emerging and emerged economies to open up new vistas for business and, with them, further economic growth.

New Global Challenges
An interesting addition to these drivers is the current global financial crisis. This article is not about that, but in the case of the telecommunications industry the recession’s impact is fascinating enough for a brief diversion. Far from damaging the industry, the recession is actually causing acceleration in developments that have been underway for more than a century. The global market for telecoms services has shown steady growth for 20 years now (according to estimates from ITU and Gartner, it grew 25% in total during this period) and today exceeds US$1.4tn.

The growing importance of emerging economies to global GDP is today causing a qualitative change in demand for telecom services in the world economy. While higher growth rates in these countries stimulate demand for telecom services, development of those infrastructures and services has actually fallen because the construction of the necessary infrastructure seemed prohibitively expensive.

This is particularly the case when there are exciting new services that can be sold to rich, developed economies that have consumers and businesses crying out them. Now that the recession has made those developed economies tighten their belts, we are finally seeing huge investment in new telecoms infrastructures in emerging economies.

BRIC on the Global Run
A report from TeleGeography entitled ‘Global Internet Geography 2009’ shows America is losing its position as the global centre of Internet activity. Due to the growth of international bandwidth in other parts of the world, more traffic than ever before bypasses North America completely: where nine years ago 91% of data communications went through US to reach Asia , only 54% did in 2008. Europe is attracting more and more traffic from Asia and Africa, with the inevitable result that bandwidth demand inside Europe and Asia will only grow in the years to come.

Associated with this is the emergence of new, powerful international players that will naturally require more and more bandwidth to major international telecom points-of-presence in North America, Europe and Asia . International expansion will not only provide their connectivity needs for domestic customers, but also further push them into international markets. Moreover, they will contribute significantly to the development of international telecom infrastructure, including the use of their national backbones for international transit services.

This exponential growth of bandwidth demand makes the requirement for substantial new capacity to cope with future demand both obvious and pressing. At the same time, the opportunity to invest in networks of increased resiliency and diversity is very real. Several new submarine cables will be launched over the coming years to cope with these requirements: the Trans-Pacific Express, the Asia-American Gateway, Unity (in the Pacific Ocean) the Europe-India Gateway, IMEWE, and MENA in the Indian Ocean.

Land Routes and Integration
Of course, the construction of a terrestrial network in Eurasia for global transit has long been considered as an excellent complement, or even alternative to these submarine systems, but only recently has this become a reality with the development of high capacity and redundant fibre-optic networks in Russia , India and China .
Despite many existing challenges, terrestrial cables linking Europe and the Middle East too have entered the phase of practical discussion. Opportunities for international network growth include routes through Turkey and Syria as well as Russia , Azerbaijan and Iran .

It would seem, then, that harmonisation of global transit flows between submarine and terrestrial cable networks is strategically important both for the diversification of the risks inherent in global telecommunications and to cope with increasing bandwidth demands.

However, several hurdles must be passed in order to accomplish this:
·         Establishment of new partnerships: network interconnection is dependent entirely on the mutual good will of operators on all sides
·         Providing seamless bandwidth along the land and wet routes: as partners may have their own needs in their respective domestic markets, they may have to separate transit capacity
·         Market liberalisation and regulation: many countries still have discrepant telecom legislation as well as a need to accept and abide by WTO rules

The appearance of alliances between terrestrial backbone providers in such a large territory as Eurasia changes international data flows within the continent. The more interconnections that are made, the more traffic distribution will become optimised in accordance with the needs of domestic operators. In turn, this will influence the balance of external data flows provided by the submarine cable systems of today.

First steps
Of course, some time is still needed to build wide-spread internal interconnections. This is likely even more important than new cable systems, especially when considering networks that must traverse new territories where no existing footprint is present. But the very fact that this is happening with gathering pace should also prove the value of the emerging economy countries to global carriers. 

Since the first STM-1 cable seamlessly connected Europe – Russia – Mongolia – China in 2004, significant effort has been made to install global transit-level capacity. By 2009, the fruits of these labours had paid off, and total transit capability of the Trans-Russia terrestrial route has increased a hundred-fold.

Taken in conjunction with new cables that have been and continue to be laid to Japan, as well as existing connections to other CIS countries, it is finally realistic to speak of the creation of a trans-continental Eurasian data highway.

This new land route has already been integrated into the existing global network thanks to its connections with various European and Asian telecoms hubs. Several global carriers have begun to use the terrestrial route via Russia as a part of their world-wide networks, including China Telecom, China Unicom, PCCW, NTT Communications, Telstra International, Global Crossing and others. Bharti Airtel plans to make connections from India to Europe, complementing and backing up current submarine routes to Hong Kong by using terrestrial cables to China .

The continually rising demand for capacity and next-generation telecoms services will push further optimisation of the Eurasian data highway in all links of the chain of partner networks. Where national backbones have been employed as distribution networks for voice or Internet traffic within a country, connection with global transit routes only increases transit capabilities. It is not a question only of the amount of capacity available, but also of transformation of the backbone topology and network management: ultra long-haul DWDM networks have recently been implemented in Europe and America , and this approach is expected to be followed in Eurasia very shortly.

Benefits for global players
If a final reason were needed to convince globally-established carriers to invest, the wide choice of terrestrial and submarine routes currently being built and – in some cases – already offered by the emerging economy countries provides it. New advantages for international carriers connected to these include:
·         The shortest route for sensitive traffic transit over for long-distance voice routes, as well as for growing real-time applications in IP networks
·         Direct access to emerging economies and new growing markets, along with everything that entails both now and in the future
·         Multiply-redundant (and therefore protected and secure) international networks, which move from single point-to-point connections to a global mesh infrastructure

An example may serve to illustrate this last. PCCW Global successfully managed risks around the 2008 cable cut incidents due to the diversified network it built after the Taiwan earthquake in December 2006. The company rapidly re-routed its traffic from the Middle East to Hong Kong and then to Europe through TTK’s terrestrial route. This was made possible due to consistent TTK efforts in increasing backbone capacity along its terrestrial route between Europe and Asia, and especially thanks to its building of international gateways with all backbone carriers in China - China Unicom, China Netcom, China Tie Tong and China Telecom.

Way to Harmony
While there may still be a way to go before all the new possibilities of integrated terrestrial and submarine networks can be realised on a global scale, we can rely on the fact that demand breeds supply. And the demand is most certainly there.

A changing global economy inevitably produces new leaders, and the international telecom industry reflects this through emerging demand in international bandwidth at new destinations. Eurasia, by serving as a prototype for the new generation of global telecoms infrastructures organisations are building today, demonstrates the effectiveness of new and hybrid solutions, which are attracting global players today.

Most powerful of all, consider this: the connection of the economies of North America, Western Europe and parts of Asia via the US and submarine telecommunications systems resulted in the phenomenon we know as globalisation. This led directly to some of the most sustained periods of global economic growth in recorded history.

But today, not in spite of but because of the crisis the world is facing, a second wave of globalisation is about to begin.  Reinforcing and improving existing connections, and bringing new and potentially powerful countries and economies to a level playing field for the first time; the possibilities are positively breath-taking.