Fat pipes, Oxygen and Digital Video.......................
techweb.cmp.com
Group lays out fiber plan for 'super-Net'
By Larry Lange
LAS VEGAS -- Representatives of more than 250 telecommunications carriers and regulators from 175 countries will gather here Dec. 7 for the first official technical meeting on an ambitious plan to deploy an alternative "super-Internet" over the next three to six years. Promoters say the global fiber-optic network could erase the boundaries between Internet and traditional telecommunications, allow true connectivity from anywhere in the world, open doors to smaller carriers that could buy capacity "on the fly" and shift the profit model from voice service to data and video.
But critics question where the money will come from, not only for building the network but for maintaining it.
New Jersey telecom startup CTR Group has issued a set of specifications and an invitation to submit technical proposals for the marine survey, installation, and maintenance of the proposed network under an initiative called Project Oxygen. The plan is for the first phase to be operational by 2000 and the entire network by 2003. Estimated to cost $14 billion, Project Oxygen's mostly undersea cable would extend 275,000 kilometers and transmit data at a minimum of 100 Gbits/second, with speeds eventually reaching 1 terabit/s.
"Today, the Internet is a voice- and data-driven phenomenon," said Neil Tagare, CTR's president and author of the initiative. "What we are proposing here is the network of the future--a video-based Internet, which requires greater bandwidth." CTR is expected to unveil a model for buying and pricing international bandwidth at the Vegas meeting.
"You could almost call it breathtaking," said Graham Finnie, a research director at Yankee Group Europe (Watford, U.K.). "Project Oxygen is a global cable system of almost inconceivable scale and audacity. If built, it would transform international telecommunications more rapidly and more completely than any previous innovation in the field."
Today's Internet, Tagare said, cannot meet the business and consumer needs of the near future. "That's why we named the project Oxygen. For carriers, it's a matter of survival."
Tagare said he believes the network will "in effect erase the dividing line between Internet and traditional telecommunications," rendering distance and geography irrelevant as factors in telecom costs and tariffs. With Project Oxygen in place, said Tagare, bandwidth will be so abundant that international voice-phone calls will eventually become a free service, with international carriers instead deriving revenue from video and data traffic and from such applications as "telemedicine" and "tel-education."
Some carriers who plan to attend the meeting said they're glad to see such an initiative in the works. "Oxygen is going to be a huge IP [Internet Protocol] network," said Stefano Pascucci, president of carrier Alpha-Tel (Sea Cliff, N.Y.). "Although it's expensive to own initially in terms of the capital investment, the payout will be much more cost-effective over time, making us much more competitive." Alpha-Tel maintains its own switching facilities locally and internationally.
The telecom model now in place requires that carriers predict the traffic they will carry for the next 25 years, then lease that capacity to third parties, such as other service providers, or use it themselves to provide such services as telephony. Oxygen looks to open the door to hundreds of new carriers.
In light of the Internet's growing demand for capacity, the old model is now an "inflexible and inefficient system," Tagare said. CTR intends to let carriers buy capacity on the fly.
"The cost of trivial amounts of bandwidth for individual switched international phone calls will fall so low that it won't be worth billing end users for it," said Finnie of Yankee Group Europe. The current market for international phone calls is around $90 billion. If Project Oxygen takes off, Finnie said, "this revenue stream may dry up altogether in five to seven years' time."
Track record
The initiative is gaining credibility among industry insiders, as CTR stacks up its initial cash on hand, a compelling staff and Tagare's successful related track record. Keynoting the meeting will be Pekka Tarjanne, secretary general for the International Telecommunications Union (ITU, Geneva), which coordinates global telecom networks, standards and services.
"The Oxygen project is indeed a very interesting concept," Tarjanne said in an interview with EE Times. "It will open up competition in terms of technology, services and systems. That's healthy. It's in the interest of consumers in terms of more services, better quality and lower prices."
Six unidentified multinational companies, from the United States, Europe and Japan, have provided capital to launch the project. CTR has signed up the former chairman of Egypt's national telephone company as the Oxygen project's rep in the Middle East and Africa. Other recruits include a former AT&T submarine-systems director and a former telecom adviser to President Bush.
Tagare himself is an entrepreneur who has "already helped redraw the world's submarine-cable map once," said the Yankee Group's Finnie. Tagare was responsible for a related, recently completed project called Flag (for Fiber-optic Link Around the Globe). The resultant infrastructure of undersea cable stretches from Europe through the Middle East and Southeast Asia to Japan; at more than 27,000 km, it is the longest submarine cable in the world. It is also the first undersea cable to have been largely privately financed and constructed.
Yet Brad Holmes, an industry consultant and former U.S. secretary of state for international communications said Oxygen is "not Flag II. It's an exponentially grander project, one that allows full connectivity everywhere in the world."
Holmes said the Vegas meeting, which he will attend, will detail Oxygen-related issues involving Internet traffic, related economics, architecture and protocols, and the marine survey.
One plus for the project in the international arena is that it would break the United States' dominance of Internet connectivity. Currently, more than half of intra-European and intra-Asian traffic is funneled through the United States. Russia's 150 million people will share only 40 Mbits/s of international Internet capacity by next year, and India's 900 million people have just 10 Mbit/s of Internet capacity--only about as much as is available on a small U.S. LAN--to the United States. With Oxygen, the capacity available to those countries could increase as much as 1 million times.
In contrast to Oxygen, such initiatives as the proposed Internet 2 and so-called Overnet solutions would yield an even more U.S.-centric Internet backbone infrastructure over the next few years. "The Internet today is a hub-and-spoke system, with the U.S. at the center of the entire world," said Tagare. "That's not right, technologically or politically."
Oxygen's infrastructure would also be independent of such existing or developing structures as Telkom's Far-East cable and AT&T's Africa One cable. Instead, the project looks to build Internet "townships"--collections of businesses and institutions built around global communications.
There is however, the question of satellites: Haven't they pretty much rendered telephone cables obsolete?
"Not really," said Geoff Parr, a manager of international networks and technology at Australia's Telstra Corp. "Fiber-optic cables transmit voice and data traffic with higher reliability and security at a cheaper rate than satellite. While a satellite call must travel 27,000 miles (35,780 km) from the earth to the satellite and back, a trans-Pacific fiber-optic call need only travel about 5,000 miles point-to-point."
Still, "Internet in the sky" satellite projects, such as an effort from Teledesic (Kirkland, Wash.) and Motorola Inc.'s Celestri project, have already raised considerable funding--$10 billion and $13 billion, respectively, in the case of Teledesic and Motorola.
Tagare argued that Oxygen could work in tandem with such systems. He said CTR will work in tandem with at least one global satellite operator.
Additionally, Oxygen is the first submarine-cable project that has been conceived from the start as a network, rather than a loosely knit accumulation of individually planned cables. And the network will have more landing points (over 200) than any previous venture.
Oxygen will not be without its problems however, even if Tagare and CTR can raise the daunting $14 billion projected to be required for deployment.
"There's a lot of secrecy here that brings to mind some of the promise of 'swampland in Florida,' " said Kathy Hale, an Internet analyst for Dataquest Inc. "But at the same time, it could be a major fund-raiser, where a number of people could bring in enough so they can begin the project."
Alpha-Tel's Pascucci said he has "lots of questions" to pose at the upcoming meeting. "The curious side of it will be, how is it all going to be managed?"
Rules and faults
Logistics issues include the myriad rules designed to ensure that cables crossing one another remain maintainable, said Telstra's Parr. The rules are intended to guarantee that cable sections can be recovered, repaired, routed correctly and even heated--all labor-intensive functions, both for man and for monitor.
Oxygen would require a fleet of 60 cable-maintenance ships to deal with faults--more than double the world's current submarine-cable-maintenance fleet, of 29 vessels. Industry analysts have estimated that such a fleet would cost $100,000 each day to run.
But the worst of the problems--acknowledged even by CTR's Tagare--concern the global politics of networking. The political aspects of the Flag project alone took the better part of seven years to iron out, as the dominant companies tried to block competition by lobbying the international telecom ministries.
"The risk is that it's a new, untested model that Tagare is trying to impose on the international-telecommunications community," said the Yankee Group's Finnie, "and he has to win support, or it won't go anywhere."
Tagare acknowledged meeting with corporate resistance to the concept "every day," adding, "Change is always difficult, but a paradigm shift is even more difficult. Right now, the phone industry--especially the international part of it--doesn't want to hear the story of Internet fax and Internet phone making their revenues dwindle down to zero, but it's going to be a way of life.
"Nobody wants to be the telegraph company of the future. This meeting will make that clear."
Oxygen may only be one answer to the growing demand for network capacity, according to ITU Secretary General Tarjanne. "The explosion of the Internet will continue, and the industry should be prepared.
"Oxygen will not be the last of its kind," Tarjanne said. |
