MM, This is an interesting network. Are you aware of it?
projectoxygen.com
Project OXYGEN Network is a planned global undersea optical fiber cable network comprising 169,000 kilometers, with landings in major countries around the world. It offers capacity of 2.56 Terabits on transoceanic segments.
It was created to serve the changing needs of the communications marketplace, in particular to meet the needs of Internet users and e-communicators. These data-dominated means of communicating are fueling unpredented growth in international telecomunnications traffic. Only an infrastructure development with the size and flexibility of Project OXYGEN can be expected to fill the huge and unpredictable need for capacity.
Global Telecommunications - A Changing Scene
Just a few years ago, the vast majority of international telecomunications traffic consisted of voice calls. Data represented a small fraction of international telecommunications traffic, typically about 10 percent.
Today, that has changed. While the rate of growth of voice and fax traffic is fairly predictable - 10 to15 percent yearly - the rate of growth for data has risen exponentially. The compounded annual growth rate of Internet and e-traffice was 87% for the five years between 1993 and 1998.
By 2002, it is predicted that voice will represent only 10 percent of total international traffic. Because of this, the consortium method of planning and building cables is no longer an ideal business model. The point-to-point nature of today's network means that provisioning long distance circuits is time consuming, labor intensive and expensive. For example, a carrier needing connectivity from India to the United States, has to obtain capacity on several cable systems and negotiate transits through each country. These multi-country, end-to-end links are also difficult to change.
The OXYGEN Network - Designed To Respond To The New Requirements
Project Oxygen is the first truly global undersea fiber cable network to be designed for a data-dominated world. It offers such features as portable bandwidth, made possible by OXYGEN's ubiquitous network and switching capability. It also leads the industry in establishing a new pricing model - the purchase of circuits on a unilateral basis, with pricing based solely on the amount of capacity bought.
Traditional systems do not usually include switching capability within their design, except where needed to provide restoration. OXYGEN Network includes high-speed, combined ATM/SDH switching within the network design. These switched will be used to provide the flexibility that is being demanded by carriers to meet their rapidly changing traffic requirements. Using the Lucent Bandwidth Manager platform will provide the network with the capability to carry any type of voice and data traffic. Carriers will be able to use the network to transport PDH, SDH, ATM and IP traffic between any points on the network. Additionally, the network will provide broadcast capabilities, not available on today's point-to-point international cable network.
The OXYGEN Network will also have its own network management system. This will include three Network Management Centers, which are geographically separated. This network management system, working in conjunction with the Bandwidth Manager switches, will be the engine that provides unprecedented flexibility to carriers using the OXYGEN Network for their future needs.
OXYGEN Is A Highly Reliable Network
A network like OXYGEN need to be highly reliable to provide carriers with the availability they need to be able to provide consistently high grades of service to their customers. This reliability is achieved through the use of SDH ring Verdana, which enables traffic to be restored automatically, within 300 milliseconds, in the event of a fault anywhere in the ring. In the highly unlikely event that the SDH ring restoration is not able to restore traffic, for example because of multiple faults within the same ring, the Centers will be able to see and manage all the surviving network resources. This will enable the Management Centers to deal effectively with any type of fault condition on the network. This gives OXYGEN Network a significant advantage over the traditional cable systems, which do not have unified management of all the available resources. |
