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New Zealand Engineering 1999 September IT- Networks
Fast food for your PC Capacity It will be big and very fast, and give New Zealand far greater access to the global information superhighway. ‘It’ is a new, 29,000 kilometre fibreoptic cable that will form three vast loops across the Pacific Ocean floor, linking Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Hawaii and the US. It’s being installed right now. The cable is owned by Southern Cross Cables Ltd (SCCL), a consortium comprising Telecom NZ (50%), Cable and Wireless Optus (40%) and MCI WorldCom (10%). It has a budget of A$1.5 billion and will provide a 120% leap in bandwidth capacity (the amount of data you can put down a cable at a certain speed) over the existing PacRim fibreoptic cable linking Australasia to North America. And more bandwidth is what this cable is all about. "The uptake of the internet has occurred faster than any other technology in the history of civilisation," says Ross Pfeffer, director of SCCL’s Asia Pacific market, "including the car, phone, computer and TV. But without bandwidth, the internet cannot fully penetrate our business life. We need it in ever increasing amounts." The Southern Cross cable is a substantial answer to that need. Its remarkable capacity allows data transfer at 120 gigabits per second (Gbit/s) and a one-way transmission delay of a mere 70 ms between Sydney and California. That speed will find ready users for applications such as voice and data integration, e-commerce, information and music distribution, video on demand and video conferencing. Perhaps more remarkable than the performance is the cable itself: six ultra pure silica glass fibres (each about the diameter of a human hair). The fibres run at the core of the cable and are encased in a variety of sheaths including teflon, stainless steel, copper and PVC. The copper sheath also functions as a conductor, carrying 10 kV to power the signal repeaters (distributed every 30 km along the cable). The Southern Cross cable will be one of the world’s fastest fibreoptic links (consider that the existing PacRim cable transfers data at 1Gbit/s) and Mr Pfeffer says much of improved performance stems from advancements in fibreoptic technology. "The scope for extracting bandwidth from the light spectrum is almost infinite compared with the radio spectrum used by satellites. At the beginning of the decade, capacity per submarine fibre pair was 0.5 Gbit/s. Within two years capacity will be 1000 Gbit/s per individual fibre." Given the predicted growth in demand for data transmission, that’s probably just as well. The capacity of trans-oceanic cable traffic to the US, for example, is projected to increase from 32 to 1000 Gbit/s by 2001. And US analyst, Forrester Research, predicts that the country’s business trade on the internet will mushroom from $43 billion in 1998 to $1.3 trillion in 2003. While New Zealand’s internet-based trade is unlikely to soar to those stratospheric levels, the country’s growing participation in global markets underscores the point: without bandwidth, New Zealand businesses will not be able to communicate and trade internationally. Besides, says Mr Pfeffer, "Location is no longer the key to business decisions and size does not guarantee dominance. The trend to globalisation is so strong - so fundamental - that we must respond to it. We must be part of it or we will be consumed by it." Telecom’s communications manager Glen Sowry agrees, and says the demands globalisation places on data transfer is already evident in the trans-Tasman banking industry. "Many of New Zealand’s banks are owned by and controlled from Australia. These banks need permanent, reliable links which allow them to send huge amounts of data back and forth. Existing links are already near full capacity, and for many players the new cable will become their main data highway." While the cable’s major growth area is likely to remain internet protocol (IP) traffic (with service providers fetching data from all over the world for web surfers), Telecom also anticipates that the cable’s generous capacity will initiate new IP-based data services and more innovative applications. It is already fielding queries from organisations such as Weta Productions, the company involved with filming Lord of the Rings in the South Island. Weta wants to send digitised "rushes" (the footage) to the film’s US producers every day. In a digital world, high-resolution images are renowned for their appetite, and Weta’s plan would be inconceivable without the new cable’s capacity. The SCCL cable network is being constructed in two phases, each covering half of the final configuration. Phase One will run from Sydney to California via Auckland and Hawaii. Telecom’s project manager, Alastair Sime, says this lower segment of the network should be completed by late December, and will enter service early next year. Phase Two (the upper segment) will run from California to Sydney via Hawaii and Fiji. It’s expected to be ready for service by the end of August next year. Phase One began in New Zealand in March when telecommunications contractor ALSTOM installed a 1.8 kilometre section of cable across Auckland’s Upper Waitemata Harbour. It forms part of a link between Telecom’s two cable stations at Takapuna and Whenuapai. The first offshore cable was laid in April - a three kilometre section that runs from Auckland’s Muriwai Beach to an anchored buoy. Mr Sime says the cable ship Innovator picked up and joined the end of the short section to the main cable. "We were worried about weather conditions off Muriwai, and didn’t want to risk delaying the cable ship in the event that there was heavy surf." The 25 kilometre (land) section between Muriwai and Whenuapai has also been laid, as has a three kilometre section from Takapuna to a Telecom chamber on a nearby beach. In August, Innovator began laying the section between the Takapuna chamber and Hawaii. The fibreoptic cable is being manufactured by Alcatel plants at Sydney and Portland, Oregon. Network equipment, including landing station equipment, power feed equipment and add-drop multiplexers, is being produced by Fujitsu and Alcatel.
Prospective cable users would be excused for a fundamental concern - reliability. But Mr Sime says availability is designed to exceed 99.999%. "The designers have employed Synchronous Digital Hierarchy on a triple ring architecture to provide a self-healing network. The network is divided into three rings, representing different markets: Australasia-US, Australia-NZ and Hawaii-US. If a problem occurs in one ring, signals are automatically re-routed in the opposite direction without any discernible loss of speed." Telecom NZ has been appointed by SCCL to manage the network infrastructure 24 hours a day from a dedicated centre in Auckland. The Southern Cross cable was conceived in 1996 by a group of visionaries who anticipated the meteoric growth of the internet and its introduction of bandwidth-hungry applications. Right now, there’s probably only one question they might ask themselves of the new cable: will it be big enough? Lawrence Sch�ffler is an Auckland based industrial journalist |
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