Australian incumbent and international services provider Telstra has activated its “Always on” automatic restoration service on three submarine networks that serve Asia. The capability, which leverages technology from Ericsson and Ciena, reduces service restoration time from the previous average of eight hours to less than 30 minutes.
The service is based on Ciena’s GeoMesh Extreme portfolio, software from Ericsson, and the extensive amount of submarine network infrastructure Telstra operates in Asia. The “continuous connection service” enables traffic to be automatically rerouted to available paths if damage occurs on a submarine cable link. The capabilities currently are available on Telstra’s Singapore to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to Japan, and Japan to Singapore routes.
“Damage to a subsea cable can take weeks or even months to fix. But with our new continuous connection service, we are able to reroute customers impacted by potential damage to another subsea cable path on our three-path network in less than 30 minutes,” stated Telstra’s Head of Connectivity and Platforms, Nadya Melic, this past January when the service was unveiled.
“Typically, customers would have a ‘work’ path and a ‘protect’ path for business continuity reasons. Both paths require equipment on them at all times. This can result in high, ongoing costs for resiliency. Our ownership and management of assets allows us to reduce that cost by moving equipment from one cable to another to restore services if one fails,” Melic added in a recent Telstra press release.
Telstra estimates that availability on intra-Asia routes typically can be up to around 89%. The ‘Always on’ service has improved this uptime by an average of 20%, Telstra asserts.
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