Telstra expands availability on key APAC routes

Australia’s Telstra has expanded its Always On guaranteed connectivity service for enterprises to provide more bandwidth options on the Hong Kong to Singapore and Hong Kong to Japan subsea cable routes.

The service uses Telstra’s extensive cable network in the Asia-Pacific region to reroute traffic to another path in the event of a cable cut or damage due to a natural disaster.

The enhancement of the service will reduce latency and add more resiliency to two of Asia’s busiest subsea cable routes.

According to Telstra director for international Paul Abfalter, Telstra’s subsea cable network is the largest and most diverse in APAC, accounting for up to 30% of active intra-regional capacity.

“We now have average speeds of 28.8m/s between the Singapore (SGX) and Hong Kong (HKEX) Exchanges, 177.8m/s between the Australian (ASX) and Chicago (CME) Exchanges, 178.2m/s between Equinix/CERMAK (EQCH) in Chicago and the ASX, and 41.9m/s and 13.9m/s respectively between Singapore to Taiwan and Hong Kong to Taiwan,” he said.

“We were first in the region to develop ‘resilience as a service’ across the busy Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan triangle so customer services are restored within hours for their subscribed bandwidth, using one primary path and two protection paths over different cable systems along the same route.”

The Always On service guarantee was initially targeted at customers with capacity requirements of between 10GB and 1TB, but with the expansion the company has introduced lower bandwidth options starting at 1GB, Abfalter added.