Interconnecting with Services Providers (SPs) across the ocean is expensive and risky. The cost of the links are often the largest entry in the OPEX budget. All of it in hard currency which leaves the company (vs paying another department inside the SP). The risk to these links is often over looked. Oceanic telecommunications systems are always under threat from natural disasters (i.e. the earthquake off Taiwan in Dec 2006) and man made threats (from fishing nets snagging to intentional sabotage). Over the years, engineers have crafting what can be called principles to successful interconnects across oceans. Principles which mitigate risk, serves the business requirements, and gets the most value from the investment in the infrastructure.
In the next series of post, I will be listing and elaborating on these principles, demonstrating how a SP who follows these principles would have greater success in their trans-oceanic investments.
These principles are:
- End to End Principle
- Control both sides of your trans-oceanic connection
- The Trans-Oceanic Link is a System – Not a Circuit
- Total Visibility into what is traversing the link
- Maximize Goodput
- Revenue Linkages direct to bandwidth (differential services)
- Engineer where you drop the packets
- Vertical Business Alignment
- Anycast
- Local and Regional Interconnect
- Security and “Service Control†is Two Sided
- Engineer the Oceanic Path
- Services Symmetry
- Traffic Engineering at the Services Plane
- Social Traffic Engineering
- Total Control over the Traffic (re-color every packet)
- Blind Convergence may not be good