Telstra's new service to skirt trouble on intra-Asia subsea routes

Telstra is set to offer a new service on intra-Asia subsea routes that it says can redirect customer traffic around trouble in less than half an hour.

The continuous connection service will be showcased at the annual Pacific Telecommunications Council (PTC) conference in Hawaii this week.

It takes advantage of multiple diverse links that Telstra has capacity on and configures them using a technology by Ciena called GeoMesh Extreme. Ericsson is also involved in the project.

Telstra said that continuous connection would provide “rapid restoration” down from hours to minutes, which it called “a significant reduction to current restoration service arrangements in Asia.”

Telstra’s head of connectivity and platforms, Nadya Melic, said in a statement that the new service is available on three of Telstra’s intra-Asia routes, following successful trials run in December.

“The Asian region presents one of the most challenging environments for subsea cable systems. Busy and shallow shipping ports in Hong Kong and Singapore, high-levels of fishing activity and an ecosystem prone to natural disasters, all threaten to disrupt or damage underwater infrastructure,” Melic said.

“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.

“Through Telstra’s large subsea cable footprint and Ciena’s technology, we are able to help remove the pain of an extended outage from our customers, with almost seamless restoration of their services.”

Ciena’s vice president and general manager for Asia Pacific and Japan, Rick Seeto said that networks generally were being “more agile, resilient and adaptive” courtesy of “flexible, instrumented photonics and advanced software control.”

“These innovations allow network providers like Telstra to not only scale their network and boost capacity but also protect traffic and service delivery,” he said.

The service is set to be targeted at the likes of cloud service providers, other carriers and financial services organisations.