Telstra guarantees APAC cable network

Telstra is guaranteeing service on two of Asia’s busiest undersea cable routes, according to recent reports on technology news websites including ITWire and Computerworld. The announcement was apparently made at the Pacific Telecommunications Council conference in Hawaii mid-January.

Launching as the ‘Always On’ service guarantee, the telco says connectivity will never be interrupted on the routes from Hong Kong to Singapore and Japan to Hong Kong.

The introduction of ‘assured availability’ apparently utilises the telco’s scale and diversity to make this guarantee, natural disasters and cable damage notwithstanding.

The reports quote Ellie Sweeney, Telstra executive director of global sales: “Connectivity is vital to the modern economy, with many consumers and businesses now relying on being able to connect anywhere at any time. Meeting customers’ expectations can be difficult when it comes to international connectivity, with cables at risk of service disruptions due to cable cuts caused by boats, earthquakes and typhoons.

“We have developed a highly resilient service on key routes that will mean customers are guaranteed connectivity for their subscribed bandwidth, with one primary path and two protection paths over different cable systems along the same route.

“With our large and diverse high-capacity subsea cable network in the region, Telstra is the only provider capable of offering this level of resiliency and assurance across the busy Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan triangle for customers with large capacity requirements,” Sweeney said.

According to Telstra, its subsea cable network is the largest and most diverse in the Asia–Pacific region, accounting for up to 30% of active intraregional capacity. “This diversity puts Telstra in a unique position to reroute traffic impacted by a cable cut onto another path to minimise downtime,” said Sweeney.

“Subsea cable damage can take weeks — or even months in extreme cases — to fix. With Telstra’s Always On service guarantee, customers will be rerouted to a protection path within a matter of hours initially and with automation we expect to bring this down to a few minutes in the future.

“The strength and capacity of our network means customers can be assured that all of their subscribed bandwidth — whether it is 10 GB or 1 TB — can be supported on the same route in the event of a single or multiple outages on the primary path.

“Customers can also benefit from cost savings associated with managing multiple vendors and paying for spare capacity that may not be used,” Sweeney said.

According to Telstra, demand for data and better connectivity is growing, particularly in Asia, which is now home to almost half the world’s internet consumers. Data consumption increased by 70% last year alone.