In December 2008, when three major undersea cables faced problems, India’s internet and voice traffic slowed considerably. However, Verizon Business’s clients in India did not face problems as the company’s strategy of building a seven-way mesh infrastructure in the region paid-off, said Blair Crump, group president, Worldwide Sales. Verizon Business is a unit of Verizon Communications.
The company, says Crump, began deploying its mesh network following the Taiwan earthquake and now has 38 global mesh nodes, including 21 in the Asia-Pacific that extend from Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and the US. Mesh networking envisages each node in the network acting as an independent router (whether connected to another or not) and allows continuous connections and reconfiguration around broken or blocked paths by “hopping” from node to node until the destination is reached.
It now is building on these strengths. “We see India as a very important country. That is why we are building the Europe India Gateway (EIG) submarine cable system,” Crump told Business Standard.
A consortium of 16 telecom companies, including Bharti Airtel, signed an agreement to construct the EIG cable system, a submarine cable that will span 15,000 kilometres from the UK to India, in May 2008. EIG is projected to be completed by the second half of 2010 and is expected to cost around $700 million and have a capacity of 3.84 terabits per second (1,000,000,000,000 bits per second).
The cable joins the list of planned cable projects that will connect Europe, the Middle East and India. The New Europe-Egypt cables include the Middle-East North Africa (MENA) cable, owned by Orascom and having a capacity of 5.76 Tbps; Hawk, owned by Reliance Flag (2.56 Tbps); TE North, owned by Telecom Egypt (10.24 Tbps); and IMEWE, owned by a consortium (3.84 Tbps).
“Undersea meshing creates additional paths to seamlessly re-route traffic in the event of multiple cable breaks or network disruptions. The meshing is made possible by installing communications equipment in network facility buildings linked to the submarine cables. With recent mesh deployments in Mumbai and Chennai, Marseille in France, and Singapore, coupled with an ultra long haul build throughout France, Verizon Business now can send critical customer traffic and business applications in any direction around the world,” said Crump.
Since receiving international and national long-distance licences (ILD/NLD licenCes) in India in January 2008, Verizon Business has “seen significant expansion in the Indian market”. Crump also says that with its cloud computing or Computing as a Service (CaaS) model, it is “helping companies refocus their IT strategies to better support their current and future business objectives”.