16 January 2017 – Telstra will introduce assured availability on Asia’s busiest subsea cable routes – Hong Kong to Singapore and Japan to Hong Kong.
The new ‘Always On’ service guarantee was announced at the PTC conference in Hawaii today. It utilises the unmatched scale and diversity of Telstra’s cable network in the Asia Pacific region to guarantee connectivity even in the event of a cable cut or damage due to a natural disaster.
“Connectivity is vital to the modern economy, with many consumers and businesses now relying on being able to connect anywhere at any time. Meeting customers’ expectations can be difficult when it comes to international connectivity, with cables at risk of service disruptions due to cable cuts caused by boats, earthquakes and typhoons,” said Ellie Sweeney, Telstra’s Executive Director of Global Sales.
“We have developed a highly resilient service on key routes that will mean customers are guaranteed connectivity for their subscribed bandwidth with one primary path and two protection paths over different cable systems along the same route,” said Ms Sweeney.
“With our large and diverse high capacity subsea cable network in the region, Telstra is the only provider capable of offering this level of resiliency and assurance across the busy Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan triangle for customers with large capacity requirements.”
Telstra’s subsea cable network is the largest and most diverse in the Asia Pacific, accounting for up to 30 per cent of active intra-regional capacity. This diversity puts Telstra in a unique position to reroute traffic impacted by a cable cut onto another path to minimise downtime.
“Subsea cable damage can take weeks – or even months in extreme cases – to fix. With Telstra’s ‘Always On’ service guarantee, customers will be rerouted to a protection path within a matter of hours initially and with automation we expect to bring this down to a few minutes in the future,” said Ms Sweeney.
“The strength and capacity of our network means customers can be assured that all of their subscribed bandwidth – whether it is 10GB or 1TB – can be supported on the same route in the event of a single or multiple outages on the primary path.
“Customers can also benefit from cost savings associated with managing multiple vendors and paying for spare capacity that may not be used.”
Demand for data and better connectivity is growing, particularly in Asia, which is now home to almost half the world’s internet consumers and data consumption increased by 70 per cent last year alone. Central to this is a vast network of subsea cables which carry more than 99 per cent of international data traffic and keep us connected to the internet.
“As customer networks grow, they increasingly rely on more paths between the same end points to spread their risk and guarantee availability. This new ‘Always On’ service guarantee can save our customers time and money, while also helping improve the experience they provide their end users,” said Ms Sweeney.
Telstra’s ‘Always On’ service guarantee will be available in the coming months.
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Read more about the challenges involved in protecting our subsea cable network: http://tel.st/subseanetwork.
Media contact: Gladys Kwok/ +852 2837 4730
Email: gladys.kwok@edelman.com
About Telstra
Telstra is a leading telecommunications and information services company. We offer a full range of services and compete in all telecommunications markets in Australia, operating the largest mobile and Wi-Fi networks. Globally, we provide end-to-end solutions including managed network services, global connectivity, cloud, voice, colocation, conferencing and satellite solutions. We have licenses in Asia, Europe and the United States and offer access to more than 2,000 points of presence across the globe. For more information visit www.telstra.com.