Friday 7 August 2009
The Pressure Fibre Brings to the Internet Exchanges
So this week I have been in Frankfurt hence my relative silence. I was there to see DE-CIX (they pronounce it dee kicks) or the German Internet Exchange - one of the three largest in Europe after Amsterdam (the largest) and London. You may not be aware of these groups. They are largely invisible to the Internet consumer but without their presence your connection into the world wide web would be impossible. Essentially they are the hub through which all Internet bound traffic is routed. In the UK your ISP will have a connection to the London Internet Exchange, or LINX (https://www.linx.net/). I was chatting with the CTO and the network engineers at DE-CIX about their planning cycles and expansion plans and the impact fibre build-out will have on that. For those of you who don't know, the German telecom market differs to that of the UK in the number of large regional operators that exist - often spin outs from the utility companies who also operate in a regional manner. The BT equivalent in Germany is DT (Deutsche Telekom) and they seem to have a similar view to FTTH as BT. In other words nice to have, too expensive to justify but let's start with FTTC to a few carefully selected cabinets. Meanwhile there are some of the other operators in Germany (such as Net Cologne, Hansenet or Wilhelmtel) who are taking a more proactive stance and are rolling out FTTH services in their local urban areas. All of which, of course, will have a massive impact on DE-CIX. Today they offer ISPs two basic services (or pipes if you prefer) - 1 Gig or 10Gig. The 1Gig is more popular although they can see demand starting to ramp up for 10G pretty quickly. At the moment traffic growth is linear rather than exponential, which is good for them and makes capacity planning a little easier but it is expected to change as FTTH roll out gathers pace. At that point demand could easily outstrip capacity. Not because of any technical reason, after all 100Gig ports are quickly becoming available on network equipment and DWDM (or dense wave division multiplexing - essentially using individual wavelengths in a light beam to carry separate data streams thereby vastly increasing the capacity of an individual fibre) gives them virtually unlimited capacity upstream. Not because of any reluctance to do so, after all high speed services come with a higher tariff and resulting in higher revenues. The issue is twofold - firstly it is virtually impossible to predict the demand and therefore the requirements within their networks and secondly because upgrading their networks is not a trivial task. It takes a lot of time to test, certify and implement new technology in these networks and all of this must be done with no impact to their existing customers. In addition they have strict operational procedures (for example to upgrade a customer from a 1G service to a 10G service) and new technology means new procedures all of which adds to the time to implement. The challenges faced by DE-CIX are very similar to other operators as well in terms of capacity planning (remember the Internet exchange is a fairly basic service when compared with the vast array of voice and data services offered by many) and it is worth remembering that there are many companies involved in the transit of your Internet requests all of whom are battling to keep their heads above the rising bandwidth tide as we demand and consume ever higher bandwidth in the access networks. I'm not telling you this to generate sympathy for these groups - after all what business would not want to have such high demand for its products? I am saying we should accelerate the demand, increase the pressure! NGA must continue at pace, in fact it must accelerate! Remember NGN (Next Generation Networks) has been around for more than 10 years whereby operators are upgrading their core networks to cope with the massive surge in data traffic. We are told that the NGN brings virtually unlimited bandwidth (actually limited by the equipment on either end of the fibre and technology to deliver ever higher port speeds or wavelength capacities moves at a great pace) so let's do everything we can to fill those pipes. Let's be more creative with methods to deliver NGA. FTTH is the end-game without any doubt but let's look at more cost-effective ways we can utilise to stage our development towards the end-game. Also, and perhaps most importantly, let's not let bureaucracy stand in our way (something I am currently facing!). Let's work to educate everyone to the benefits of NGA, let's ensure politicians understand how it will help them to help us and also how they can help remove the barriers that make it so difficult (for example property tax on fibre). Let's work together to build The Fibre Generation!
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