Palapa Ring (2)

PII and IA-ITB have organized a one-day seminar on Next Generation Enterprise Network under a brand-name "Telecommunication Partnership Forum" (ShangriLa Hotel, 26th February 2008). This event was also supported by the Palapa-Ring consortium and by the government i.e. the Ministry of Communication and Information.

Several issues are revealed in this forum, especially those which are related to the Palapa Ring Project:

• The RFP is delayed possibly till the 3rd week of march.
• The consortium will build 3 rings connecting 32 places in eastern Indonesia. However the topology differs than that originally proposed by TT-Tel (compare two pics on the right! - the above pic is an artwork -- not official!)
• Length : 9,350 km undersea; 1,860 km inland
• CAPEX : approx. USD 260 mn
• Cable : 2 FP (undersea with repeater - 16/2.5 or 16/10?); 12 FP (inland / undersea repeaterless)
• Capacity : 9 lambdas lit (either 20 Gbps or 90 Gbps?), 16 potential;
• Capacity/Company : Telkom/4 , Indosat/1, BTEL/1, XL/1, Powertek/1, Infokom/0.44
• RFS : late 2009 / early 2010

MCS

I have heard that NAP Info is going to install a new submarine cable connecting Jakarta to Singapore. But it was a surprise for me that it will be ready on Q2/2008. So fast ?

Actually they began the process since early 2007, where they selected Tyco Telecommunications to construct the system. Tyco completed the marine route survey in 08/2007 and then started the marine work. The MCS (Matrix Cable System) will be jointly operated by Matrix Networks Pte Ltd (SG) and PT. NAP Info Lintas Nusa (ID). Matrix Networks holds a Facility-Based Operator (FBO) license issued by the InfoComm Development Authority (IDA), operates a cable landing station in North Changi and owns a 20 km fiber optic backhaul to four major data exchanges. NAP Info is a network access provider established in 2000 which currently owns more than 100 km terrestrial optical cable within Jakarta, connecting more than 120 buildings.

Some details for the MCS:

• Length : 1055 km Changi-JKT
• Cable : 4 FP (64/10)
• Capacity : initially 60 Gbps lit (JKT-SG), 2.5 Tbps potential
• CAPEX : -
• Branching : 1 active to Batam, 2 planned (to Perth-AUS and to other Asian countries)
• Landing Points : JTC's North Changi Industrial State (CS), North ChangiMain Cable Corridor (Beach-Manhole), Pantai Mutiara Jakarta

Matrix Networks and NAP Info offer MCS customers direct connectivity in meet-me rooms in Global Switch, Equinix, Chai Chi and Geotele data centers. Several time ago, they have begun offering a limited number of IRU contracts to major tier 1 telecommunication customers.

*Update 01/09 - Wikipedia.org*

Matrix Cable System is jointly owned and operated by PT NAPInfo Lintas Nusa (www.nap.net.id) and Matrix Networks PTE LTD (www.matrixnetworks.sg).

Matrix Cable System is initially built with 4 fibre pairs between Singapore and Jakarta, and 4 fibre pairs between Singapore and Batam with a total distance of 1055 Km.

Total bandwidth capacity of MCS Cable System is 5.12 Tbit/s, made up of 8 pairs of optical fibres, each pair providing 640 Gbit/s by Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing of 10 Gbit/s wavelengths. The 1,000 km-long undersea fully buried cable system is built in a self-healing ring configuration. The cable system, will be operational starting mid 2008.

MCS also own and operate onward connectivity from its landing stations and terrestrial network to various major POP in both Singapore and Jakarta. In Singapore, MCS sells capacity via its POP in Global Switch and Equinix. In Jakarta, MCS connects to Cyber Building and NAPInfo's own Data Center in Kuningan Plaza.

Matrix Cable system start commercial services on 08-08-08.

Statistics

Posts related to some telecom/ICT statistics:

• Bandwidth Price (1)
• Jakarta (IP) Bandwidth Price

• International IP Bandwidth
• Can Broadband Spread to the Masses?
• Indonesian DSL Market

• Indonesia's (ICT) Statistics

• P2P Internet Traffic: The Elephant
• The Hengchun Earthquake: A Flashback to the Networking Disaster

• SMS: A 23 Years Old Cash Cow
• Broadband: Penetration and Pricing
• Intra-Asia IP Traffic
• Intercontinental Internet Bandwidth
• Onnet vs. Offnet
• Indonesian Telcos: The Map (1)
• Indonesian Telcos' Customer Base (2006)

• Domestic Bandwidth Price

Indonesian Telcos/ISPs

Posts related to indonesian telcos/ISPs:

• Telkom's Backbone
  

• Jakarta Metro Backbone
• PT. Power Telecom (PowerTel)
• Mobile Network Coverage: Telkomsel
• PGASKOM (PGAS Telekomunikasi Nusantara)
• Excelcomindo's Backbone
• Mobile Network Coverage
• Highlight ISAT (Indosat)
• Highlight BTEL (Bakrie Telecom)
  
• Highlight Three HCPT (Hutchison)
• Highlight Telkom
  
• Highlight Axis (Natrindo - NTS)
• Highlight Mobile-8
  
• Indosat's Backbone (2)
• Highlight TSEL (Telkomsel)
• Highlight XL (Excelcomindo)
• Indosat's Backbone

• Onnet vs. Offnet
• Indonesian Telcos: The Map (1)
• Indonesian Telcos' Customer Base (2006)

Backbone/Networks

Posts related to terrestrial/mixed infrastructure:

• Telkom's Backbone
  

• Jakarta Metro Backbone
• How Much Bandwidth do Indonesian ISPs Have?
• PT. Power Telecom (PowerTel)
• Mobile Network Coverage: Telkomsel
• PGASKOM (PGAS Telekomunikasi Nusantara)
• National and Regional RENs
• Excelcomindo's Backbone
• Mobile Network Coverage
• Indosat's Backbone (2)
• Palapa Ring (5)
• First Generation Domestic Optical Cable Systems
• International IP Bandwidth
• Wiring Kalimantan
• Indosat's Backbone
• National Fiber Optic Backbone
• Wiring Sumatera
• High Performance Backbone (HPBB)

• Singapore: The Regional Teletraffic Junction
• Metro and Access Infrastructures

• Indonesia's Domestic LD Infrastructure

P2P Internet Traffic : The Elephant

Since several years ago, peer-to-peer issues have been a central topic on IP networking. This has been pictured in the program of some top networking conferences e.g. INFOCOM, SIGCOMM, ITC, GLOBECOM etc. What actually makes P2P issues so important?

One possible answer can be seen in the graph at the right. According to Telegeograhpy, as of 2007 54% of the total Internet traffic is originated from P2P applications which are in the forms of video (61%), audio (11%) and other formats (27%).

Some other facts (taken from Telegeography):

• P2P traffic accounts for nearly 60% of Internet traffic (Sandvine)
• The share of P2P traffic varies from 10% to 70% depending on a carrier's customer base and geograpic coverage (TG's interviews with carriers)
• When TPB torrent network was taken down in Sweden, TeliaSonera's Internet traffic declined by 60%!
• P2P accounted for 50% of upstream capacity on Japanese networks in 04/2006 (Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications)

Applications that may or may not impact long-haul networks:

• YouTube serves 70 mn low-res videos daily!
• Online Gaming: World of Warcraft reported 6.5 mn subscribers in early 2006
• Video Calling: Microsoft claimed that users of Microsoft Messenger engaged in 1.1 bn minutes of video calling during 01/2006 (how about Yahoo?)
• Sporting events which routinely streamed online (World Cup, major league baseball etc.)
• Grid Computing : Teragrid (10 Gbps connections)
• In 06/2006 more than 106.5 mn people (3 of 5 US Internet users) streamed or downloaded video (in total, nearly 7.2 bn videos were streamed or downloaded - comScore 09/2006)

The Hengchun Earthquake : A Flashback to the Networking Disaster

On one side, it is no doubt that network reliability is important. But on the other side, "important" is something that can be understood differently. Thus, network reliability might be implemented variously according to some tradeoffs. What portion given to reliability aspects depends on the owners' strategy and policy. Let's consider an example.

A powerful earthquake of 7.1 magnitude happened on 26th December 2006, shaking the seabed off southern Taiwan. 9 submarine cables in the strait of Luzon between Taiwan and the Philippines were broken, disrupting communications to/from several asian countries to the rest of the world via those regional/trans-pacific cables. As of 2007, at least 16 submarine cables are laid on the seabed of the Luzon strait; why do so many systems have paths through this region ? is there no other possibility to connect SE Asia to the US ? Hmm.

What were the impacts of this earthquake? Yes, sure :-D the Internet in Asia stopped ! According to ANC:

• Taiwan, Hong Kong, China (total daily GDP = USD 7.56 bn) went offline ... as did most of South (East) Asia
• Google, Yahoo, MSN (total daily revenue = USD 53.4 mn) became unreachable from much of Asia (of significant traffic originators!)

• Estimated total bandwidth impacted 600+ Gbps
• Estimated total Internet capacity impacted 500+ Gbps

The role of telecommunication and the Internet is nowadays almost not replaceable. Such a disastrous event would affect day-to-day (business) activities such as financial markets (incl. banking, commerce, airline bookings etc.) and general communications (e.g. voice, email, web etc.). In the above case, even with the rerouting through undamaged cables, delays were experienced in the following weeks. It took 11 ships 49 days to restore everything back to normal. This was due to the number of faults, the availability of cable repair vessels, adverse sea conditions, the occurance of faults in water depths down to 4000m and the burial of some cables under a layer of mud.

The following cable systems were affected by the Hengchun earthquake (totally 21 faults were recorded in 9 cables):

• C2C : 2 major breaks (S2/5)
• APCN : 2 major breaks (sB5/B17)
• APCN2 : 2 major breaks (s3/7)
• SMW3 : 3 major breaks
• EAC : 1 minor break
• ...