As Neptune’s trident has struck Port Alberni this December 8th 2009 he must have remembered the day more than a century ago when the All Red Line was completed close by at the Bamfield Cable Station in October 1902. The first Global network circling the Globe, projecting the might of the British Empire and Neptune’s first globe spanning copper belt.

I would suspect that not many current Tata Communications employees formerly from Teleglobe are aware that the Canadian All Red landing stations became part of what one day would become the COTC (Canadian Overseas Telecommunication Corporation) renamed Teleglobe in 1975. No current employee, for sure, remembers that the initial cable station was in Bamfield on Vancouver Island. The Bamfield Marine Centre happens to be located on the old cable station property and its website provides some interesting tidbits. The original cable station was constructed in 1902, with the underwater telegraph cable laid in October of the same year by the cable ship Colonia and operated by the Eastern Pacific Board (EPB). The cable ran nearly 4,000 miles across the Pacific from Bamfield to Fanning Island, an atoll in the mid-Pacific which the British annexed specifically for that purpose as they wanted the cable completely on British territory. From there the cable continued to Fiji, New Zealand and Australia. We further learn that The Canadian Pacific Railway Company constructed the Cable Station plus Bachelors Quarters and Manager’s House in 1901-1902, and that on November 1st 1902, the first two telegraph messages to encircle the globe were relayed. In 1926, a second building was constructed and at the same time, a second cable was laid via Hawaii to Suva, Fiji.

In 1950 the Canadian Government nationalized international telegraph cable assets and formed COTC taking over the Bamfield Cable Station. In 1953, the two cables were extended up the Alberni Canal and in 1959, a new state-of-the-art cable station was built in Port Alberni and the Bamfield Cable Station was shut down. The last messages were sent from Bamfield on June 20th, 1959.

The next highlight would take place in late 1963 with the inauguration of the British Commonwealth COMPAC, the first global cable system suited for telephony landing in Port Alberni. COMPAC was to a certain extent a post colonial successor of the Imperial All Red Line. The idea was to link the UK, South Africa, Sri Lanka, India, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and back to UK with an undersea telephone cable system ringing the world. For the Canadian portion of the ring, Teleglobe, still called COTC in those days, completed the transatlantic Cantat-1 in 1961 while the Trans Canada portion was microwave based and installed by Canadian Pacific Railways across the continent all the way to Vancouver Island. HRH, Queen Elisabeth inaugurated the COMPAC system with a call to Australia. The capacity of COMPAC was 80 telephone circuits and one telephone circuit could carry 22 telegraph channels!

Then came ANZCAN in 1984, as a replacement for COMPAC. The cable had a capacity of 1,380 telephone circuits, quite amazing compared to COMPAC twenty years earlier. The Canada-Hawaii portion of good old ANZCAN went into retirement in 1997.

The crowning achievement and grand finale at Port Alberni was the installation and activation of TPC-4 in 1992. This cable pioneered deep-sea cable branching as two cables, one leaving from Port Alberni and one from Point Arena north of San Francisco in California, joined together with at a deep-sea junction and continued as one cable to Chikura in Japan. Naysayers at the time said such undersea branching would never work but business and political considerations plus the persuasion of our VP Engineering at the time, Martin Fournier, prevailed. Needless to say that today, undersea branching is common place.

The early days of 1997 then saw TPC-5 coming on-line with two landing points in the USA, one at San Luis Obispo, California and the Northern landing at Brandon, Oregon. By then the political imperatives to have a landing point within Canadian waters had all but vanished in the context of competition, efficiency and liberalization of the telecom market. It made more economic and business sense to connect terrestrially to Bandon. The days of¨Port Alberni as a cable landing station were counted. It was a matter of how long TPC-4 would still continue to be commercially viable. Marking the end of an era, TPC-4 was decommissioned late 2003 and for the first time in more than a century no transpacific cable traffic reached or left the Canadian shores.

In the fall 2004 the cable station was sold to the University of Victoria for a most worthwhile project. The Neptune initiative is run by a consortium of university and scientific organizations, lead by the University of Victoria and received its first funding in 2003. University of Victoria bought the former Teleglobe cable landing station building on Mallory drive. The 800-kilometre cable network launched this month starts and ends in Port Alberni describing a 800 km long ring at the ocean bottom. The cable was specially built by Alcatel as it has non conventional power requirements for sensor arrays, cameras, hydrophones, automated submarine robotic vehicles and the like. How many telegraph channels could the 10 gigabit backhaul to UVic carry?

It is rejuvenating and most enjoyable to see Teleglobe’s two former cable landing stations used for natural sciences especially in these days of growing concern about global warming and sustainable development of the planet; I look forward to see the science produced by Neptune and to stream some ocean views to my laptop screen or my smartphone.

Videoconferencing services have been touted as the “next big thing” for a decade or more, but poor video quality and time lags have hampered uptake. However, the latest generation of videoconferencing services, known as Telepresence, take advantage of class-of-service capabilities on MPLS networks to deliver high-definition video and audio, life size and in real time.

The first-generation uptake on Telepresence has largely been for within-organization collaboration at large multinationals. However, as companies look to improve ROI on their investments in dedicated Telepresence rooms, one of the key demands emerging is for interconnection for Telepresence services running on different networks. With interworking enabled, organizations can expand their internal Telepresence community of users to include customers, suppliers, and business partners, further increasing utilization rates for their Telepresence rooms.

The i3 Forum is planning to discuss how carriers will support interconnection between private Telepresence rooms on different networks. Since classes of service are required to support the service, interconnection over the public Internet isn’t an option – this is where some of the emerging standards such as IPX will become increasingly important.

An important meeting was held on July 21st in Delhi where the Indian Department of Telecommunications (DoT) issued guidelines for the IPv6 deployment in India based on a set of recommendations issued by TRAI, the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority. The meeting was organized by TEC, the Telecommunication Engineering Centre which is part of DoT.
The session included presentations by the Government and Telecommunication providers including Tata Communications and TTSL, the Tata Group Mobile operator.

The agenda and copies of the various presentations can be found at http://www.tec.gov.in/seminar.html

What follows is a synopsis of the status of the Indian Telecom sector and the Government recommendations as well as an overview of IPv6 deployment in the Tata Communications Indian domestic IP network AS4755 and its international IPv6 connectivity through Tata Communications Global IP network AS6453. The Tata Communications IP networks already respond to most if not all of the DoT recommendations making it number one in terms of IPv6 deployment and coverage in India.

1. Indian telecom sector

• Total subscriber base of of 452.91 million as of May 2009
• year over year growth rate of 42.99% during 2008-2009
• second biggest network in the world
• teledensity of 37.94 per 100
• adding about 11 million telephone subscribers per month (May 2009)
• 13.64 million internet subscribers, 6.4 million BB customers (May 2009)
• 59.48% growth in BB during 2008-2009

2. Internet growth

Source: DoT

• total of 270 ISP licenses in the country
• 281 telecom access service providers in 22 service areas; the scope of access services includes internet, broadband and unrestricted internet telephony since 2004.

3. India’s insufficient IP address space

• the current pool of Indian IPv4 addresses is around 19 million
• based on most recent statistics, India’s consumption of unique IP4 addresses has grown 52 %
• India is number 20 in the world in address consumption
• Transition to IPv6 is the only viable medium term answer to satisfy anticipated demand for unique IP addresses.

4. Regulatory environment

• In 2004 then Minister Of Communications Hon. Mister Maran set up a 10 point agenda for the modernization of telecommunications in India. The ten points included broadband, introduction of 3G in telephony and the transition to IPv6
• Consultations on IPv6 were held with the industry in following years and position papers prepared by TRAI (Telecommunication Regulatory Authority of India).
• The introduction of Wimax and 3G will further accelerate the observed DSL based growth of BB. Use of USOF (Universal Service) funds will accelerate broadband penetration in rural areas.
• As this acceleration will exacerbate the shortage of IP addresses, the DoT (Department of Telecommunications) decided to promulgate an IPv6 adoption and migration strategy which was first announced in June.

5. The Department of Telecommunications IPv4 to IPv6 transition strategy finalized in June 2009

The Government took the decision to act on the TRAI recommendations for IPv4 to IPv6 transition

Highlights

• Migration through encouragement rather than through mandate
• Increase awareness of IPv6 deployment through workshops and seminars organized through all relevant agencies including TEC (Telecom Engineering Centre which is part of DoT) through private and public partnership programs.
• Creation of a NIR in India (so far India has no national registry for internet addresses: IP addresses are obtained directly from APNIC, the regional internet registry for Asia).
• Government’s procurement of IT systems and networks are to be IPv6 compatible.
  DoT encourages and supports setting up testbeds by different entities including one by TEC which is already a certifying agency.
• The international gateways are to be upgraded to support IPv6. Note that the three Tata Communications international IP gateways which are provided through AS6453 (Mumbai, Cochin, Chennai) are completely dual stack IPv4/IPv6
• IPv4 and IPv6 equipment will coexist for quite some time but all new equipment deployed by end 2010 must support IPv6
• Telecom equipment manufacturers should make an effort for indigenous production and development of IPv6 compliant equipment

The objective is for the Indian Telecom Industry to use the IPv6 migration/transition for competitive advantage developing innovative IPv6 based applications and to provide full featured value added services on IPv6.

6. Status of IPv6 deployment in India today

Only 22 entities (ISP’S and R&E) have obtained IPv6 address blocks from APNIC, only four of which have deployed and announce their IPv6 routes: Ernet (India’s R&E network, equivalent of Canarie), Sify, HNS and Tata Communications.

Note that on its domestic Indian IP network (AS4755), Tata Communications provides the most extensive IPv6 support in India using 6PE technology for access and an MPLS core. IPv6 access is available in all 16 cities depicted in tier 1 and tier 2 (two inner circles) and will be expanded to tier 3 based on demand.

• AS 4755: 117 locations across India
• 3-tier Hierarchical topology
• IPv6 dual stack edge 6PE with MPLS core
• 9 Big Tier 1 cities including 4 metros
• 7 Major Tier 2 cities
• 101 Tier 3 cities

India still has a long way to go in its development including the telecommunications sector where the size of the market and the anticipated continuation of very rapid growth has attracted investments and participation by a number of foreign telecommunications companies. These include AT&T, BT, C&W, FT Orange, Verizon etc, all encouraged by an attractive liberalization policy by the Federal Government. NTT Docomo of Japan, for example bought for US$2.7 billion, a 26% stake in TTSL, Tata Teleservices Ltd, the Group’s mobile telephony operator in India. It should also be kept in mind that Indian software development departments of some major telecomm equipment manufacturers and software houses have participated actively in the development and testing of IPv6 features and functionalities creating a growing pool of home-grown IPv6 expertise.

References
1) http://www.trai.gov.in/Default.asp
2) http://www.mit.gov.in/
3) http://www.dot.gov.in/
4) http://www.tec.gov.in/
5) http://www.tataindicom.com/t-aboutus-ttsl-organization.aspx
6) http://www.tatacommunications.com/

The current economic climate has had a chilling effect on NGN rollout plans for many carriers. In the past, carriers built and developed as much as they could themselves, from a network and software perspective. Now they’re looking for more options like outsourcing or leasing, which allow them to defer significant CAPEX investment while maintaining control.

We at Tata Communications are working to support our carrier partners through some innovative architectures enabled by our NGN investment. The equipment and design we’re using in our NGN allows us to partition and create an infrastructure-sharing model that allows customers to manage and create a virtual network within our global backbone. The virtual networks are segregated and separate from ours but allow customers to tap into our network infrastructure and facilities worldwide.

Virtual networks are just one example of new features we can provide through NGN. In the future, NGN will allow us to support voice applications among end customers like mobile operators or broadband providers that follow more of a peering model rather than a call termination model. There are also new services on our enterprise side such as Voice VPN that we are looking to offer because of NGN capabilities.

As the economy continues to falter, operators will look for more and more ways to reduce costs, improve productivity, and decrease the time-to-market for new services. Tata Communications is dedicated to maximize the business impact of our NGN investment to help our customers achieve their objectives.

Over the last five years, many industry players have announced their intention to transition to a Next Generation Network (NGN). Carriers who provide international data and IP services as well as voice termination are particularly interested because of the synergies afforded when running multiple applications over one network. It’s interesting to look at the different philosophies at play in the varying ways carriers have made their plans.

When we were looking at our NGN rollout, we knew we wanted to have centralized business intelligence engines to manage our voice services and then use that information to push out instructions to our various end-points. We worked closely with our NGN equipment vendor to ensure that our routing technology could integrate with the soft switches to maintain this centralization, as well as focus on different features we think will be important down the road as we roll out new products that leverage our IP backbone.

Other carriers don’t seem to have this type of centralization focus today. They might have multiple switching facilities around the world but they effectively operate as stand-alone companies, with their own routing logic to terminate calls.

We prioritized a unified voice routing architecture because it reduces our overall operating costs as well as the expense and time-to-market associated with launching new services. With a distributed routing architecture, some services may only be available in some regions, or it may be slower and more expensive to roll out services to all regions.

Certainly there are risks and challenges associated with centralized routing management, especially during the transition phase from legacy networks to NGN. These include execution or failure risks that could impact global rather than regional performance as well as increased intra-company facilities as traffic transits from legacy to NGN end-points. However, with sufficient network design that includes redundancy and diversity, execution risk can be mitigated; and, the long-term benefits of NGN far outweigh the short-term costs of managing a hybrid network of legacy and NGN facilities.

In the end, our operator customers are the beneficiaries of our choice in network evolution, and it is instructive to see the impact that the service options presented over our NGN architecture will have.

One popular evolving technology is policy-based QoS. These types of technologies can ensure that time-sensitive services such as voice and video are prioritized above applications such as email, and that traffic from business-critical financial or inventory applications are routed ahead of Internet browsing. Network managers can even set different quality levels for internal and external voice communications or application specific quality parameters.

All applications could be largely divided under three categories,

• Requiring End 2 End Guaranteed delivery
• Differentiated delivery
• Best effort delivery

Video share, Voice may require guaranteed end 2 end bandwidth when the application is invoked, while e-mails and normal file transfers could be on best effort basis.

However, it is also possible to prioritize some type of file transfers against others in the same infrastructure, this differentiation could be determined by nature of application (like financial information), or commercial benefits of the application to the network resource manager.

Looking forward to an IPX-based service architecture, the ability to apply QoS routing to traffic will be a significant enabler for next-generation services.

New services have the potential to touch more than voice. Data, video, even monetary transactions could all come together to create next-gen service, and each type of information may need different levels of policy-based routing, based upon differing sensitivity to latencies.

In an One IP World, Carrier industry’s response in offering such flexibility to their customers, will be the one most important factor to lead the change in the legacy transport network services. Policy-based QoS plays a key role in enabling carriers to step-up to the new generation of services.

New converging world would have several applications use a common infrastructure to transport from a point to point or point to multi-point. Applications like Video download, Video Share, Instant messaging, financial transactions from a mobile phone and many such would compete with traditional voice transport link using a common IP infrastructure.

In order to ensure a high level of service for all users, service providers engage in management strategies that go beyond pure bandwidth provision.

Traffic shaping ensures that network resources are used most efficiently, and helps avoid congestion that offers a fair share of throughput and integrity determined by nature of applications or commercial sensitivity of the application,

In One IP world, intelligent transport is a function of End user determination of priority of services, Carriers bandwidth management to provide tailor made Quality of Services to each type of applications.