Having now finished its optical mesh deployments to India, Singapore, and France, Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings) is now aiming at the Middle East. Verizon Business’s optical mesh efforts takes advantage of the company’s tremendous inventory of undersea routes across the Atlantic and Pacific to automatically reroute traffic around trouble spots. If you encircle the globe, you add even greater potential resiliency. If every cable in the Pacific should break, traffic from the far east could still reach silicon valley by taking the long way around – an epic journey with latency in the ‘wow’ category but it could at least get there. Of course, that assumes you have enough capacity on all parts of the mesh, which probably won’t be true at first. But still.
The first stage will go through Egypt, since according to the PR:
The geographic location of Egypt allows for an efficient crossing from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea
Cool, maybe we ought to build a canal or something! Heh, ok is Geography 101 over yet? Thankfully, Egypt has not moved in five thousand years or else we’d have to move all those cables. Hah.
Anyway, after Egypt likely comes Dubai, and then on to India. But I wonder when it will be worthwhile for them to extend it via SEACOM down the east African coast.
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Categories: Internet Backbones · Undersea cables
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Verizon was early to take a lesson from Internet architecture in this respect, i.e., abandoning the age-old practice of using self-healing rings on long, critical routes. Meshing certainly has economic and operational advantages over self-healing rings, although it is not as deterministic in nature, nor is it as ‘fair’ to all tenants on the system. Since meshing involves a far greater potential for ‘bumping’ low priority users (routes on the Internet) than a one-to-one reroute over a ring’s recovery capacity, there’s now a greater opportunity to invoke pricing discrimination in a purely market-based sense, as well.