Outages, Balloons, Hackers: Icebergs under water?

INDIA: We must have, at some point or other, heard of the Arctic Fibre network, which is a work-in-progress but an ambitious road to provide the lowest latency route from Northern China, Korea and Japan to the UK and Northern Europe and competitive routes to the US Northeast. And at the same time it intends to displace costly and what it calls ‘unreliable satellite service' to the Canadian Arctic thereby bridging the digital divide between the Canadian Arctic and the rest of Canada, as well as, create physically diverse routes to avoid physical cable breaks plaguing carriers in the Luzon Strait, South China Sea, Suez Canal and the Mediterranean.

What really catches a spark is its ambition to reduce subsea seismic risk by providing another route into Japan and by providing eventual direct connectivity to Chongming CLS (Shanghai) through an underwater branching unit offshore Japan.

This August, Arctic Fibre reported that it successfully completed the identification of seven cable-landing points across Nunavut as part of its 15,700 km subsea fibre optic network through the Northwest Passage between London, England and Tokyo, Japan. It will now seek approvals for a subsea marine survey in 2014 and shared that installation of the cable is expected to be undertaken in 2015.

Hovering above these ice-blankets, with the purported goal of solving the question of ‘why does two-thirds of the world does not have Internet access yet' is a network of balloons. Project Loon by Google claims it is floating well around wind currents and can navigate disasters some day for people and companies seeking an unimaginable world of Internet.

Sounds fascinating huh! But then where do such ‘pipe'-dreams leave existing technologies and business models? Is it a cause of celebration or worry? Sunanda Das, MD for India at Pacnet, a provider of integrated and full-service network and data solutions to the Enterprise, and Carrier customer segments in the Asia Pacific region on what challenges and intrigues the fibre optics space now and ahead.

Project Loon or Arctic Fibre or some other breakthrough. What is your view of the future of Fibre-Optics with new contenders trying to target chinks and needs around congestion, redundancy, latency, capacity, speed etc.?

In terms of physical options, we are still dependent on fibre optics. But lot of technology-related changes can happen of course. Like 100 G Wavelength development using same fibre for much higher speeds and to provide more usage capability. But currently most of the data is still in fibre optics space. I do not see something really disruptive happening at least for a few years.

Undersea fibre specially is always submerged with possibilities of outages (both intentional and accidental acts). With Nature's vagaries like earthquakes or undersea landslides as seen in case of Japan and Taiwan on one hand and controversies of government intercepting and snooping cables on the other; how secure and dependable can such services be for enterprises?

We definitely encounter nature's acts and it is something beyond our control. At the same time, we have created multiple routing and re-routing set-ups. Our network is a meshed network. The services go on, as per our experience of last many years. Ours is a 24/7 service so any delay is avoided because faults are picked up instantly, thanks to our dedicated teams. In short, no complete outage scenario is seen at a customer's end.

How hacking-proof can such layouts be?

We take security very seriously. We deploy high-grade security in our networks. Hacking is an inevitable possibility but with additional security measures taken everyday, we ensure robust services.

Are the political contours if this business too tricky at times?

If a new network is being planned, it will touch multiple countries so discussions and agreements take time. The implementation and deployment stage is vital which can entail variations in time. At the agreement stage and to the point of making it operational, is where we have to be patient. Once deployed though, there are no such worries.

What makes your offering unique and hard to ignore in a market already served with cloud and data centre services?

Any service provider needs to understand customer nuances and has to be flexible. A lot can be customized both technologically and commercially and that is something I sense CIOs and CTOs are looking for. Services on top of network, is what is crucial. As to how unique Cloud can be, I guess, it is pretty much a broad term. We offer undersea cables, network services, hosting, back-up etc but in a way that specifically meets an enterprise customer's demands. They need security, response time, customization, configuration and I believe we are flexible enough to give them that kind of offering. Ours is one of the largest submarine networks in APAC unlike typical consortiums.

Is India still untapped enough then? What is exciting ahead?

India is getting better than what it was ten years before when networks were not reliable and other challenges stayed. Service providers have realized the gaps. From carrier customers, Telcos to global enterprises and Asian companies with delivery centres in APAC; we are eyeing a huge market. Pacnet's recent announcement of Content Delivery Network (CDN) Point of Presence (PoP) in Bangalore completes the company's comprehensive portfolio of CDN solutions in India and the Asia-Pacific region. Pacnet operates the most extensive sub-sea fiber optic network in Asia Pacific connecting major markets with multiple landing stations and interconnected data centers. Over the past several months, it has announced a new data center build in Singapore, the opening of its facility in Chongqing, China, and an expansion of its Sydney, Australia facility. The company also announced an additional investment into its sub-sea fiber networks to build a 100 Gbps network, and an expansion of its IP VPN license in China.

How does the CDN offering fit in the strategy?

By deploying more CDN PoPs across Asia-Pacific, Pacnet is able to store and deliver digital content at CDN PoPs in local markets, which accelerates the speed and distribution of content, such as rich media and applications, to Internet users. Pacnet deployed two new PoPs in China early this year to increase the performance and speed of digital content delivery in that country. Pacnet also has access to a worldwide footprint through its CDN federation partners in Europe and the United States. Also, ownership of the region's most extensive high-capacity submarine cable systems with over 46,000 km of fiber and connectivity to data centers across 16 cities in Asia Pacific - gives Pacnet unparalleled reach to major business centers throughout the region including Japan, China, India, and the United States.