The Hengchun Earthquake : A Flashback to the Networking Disaster

On one side, it is no doubt that network reliability is important. But on the other side, "important" is something that can be understood differently. Thus, network reliability might be implemented variously according to some tradeoffs. What portion given to reliability aspects depends on the owners' strategy and policy. Let's consider an example.

MIC-1

The MIC-1 (Moratelindo International Cable - One) is a new undersea optical cable owned by the youngest national backbone operator Moratelindo (Moratel). It links Batam to Changi (Singapore) and was scheduled to start the service by Q1/2008. Moratel's partner at SG side is ViewQuest (does anybody know about this company?). An SG-partner other than SingTel is rare :-) ! Moratel is a quite progressive backbone operator. Its market share of revenue would possibly be larger than ICON+ for this year.

SMS : A 23 Years Old Cash Cow

Want to know how rich are the cellular operators todays ? Let us make some calculations! For simplicity, we only consider Short Messaging Service (SMS) offered by the largest domestic operators: Telkomsel (TSEL), Indosat (ISAT) and Excelcom (XL).

The SMS production rate of these operators is quite fantastic. As of 2007, together they produced more than 400 mn SMS each day on average. Peak SMS production rates, which may happen in some special occasions, could be in the range of 1.5 to 2.0+ of the average rate. Detail average production rate for each operator can be seen in the picture.

Broadband : Penetration & Pricing

There might be several definitions for the term "broadband". Here I use this term to refer to services which run on channels / infrastructures other than those utilized by traditional voice services. Usually it should be faster than 64 kbps. Practically it denotes services using xDSL, FTTx, Cable/HFC or novel state-of-the-art wireless technologies. Some numerical data presented in this post are taken from Point Topic and REACH. Those are actually rather outdated (2004). But some characteristics concluded from those might remain similar and could be used as an approximation for our current situation.

Intra-Asia IP Traffic

This post is closely related to the previous one, except that here we discuss about Internet traffic not about bandwidth capacity. I found an interesting statement given by a REACH official:

"In 1998, 100% of IP traffic between countries in the APAC was transmitted via the US. In 2004 it was around 30% (estimated)."

Intercontinental Internet Bandwidth

Recently, Telegeography has published some information and facts for the telecommunication's world in the last year. One of the facts is related to the international IP bandwidth as given in the picture (at the top).

BRCS : What's Wrong?

Update - the illustration at the right is possibly inaccurate! Some people said that BRCS is not through Melacca strait; it connects Batam and Rengit at the right-side of Johor. It is definitely not Rengit as you can see on the illustration. Sorry for this! :-)

BRCS stands for Batam Rengit Cable System. It is a submarine optical cable linking Batam (Kepri, ID) to Rengit (Johor, MY). The cable is owned by XL at ID side and TM at MY side. It is just commisioned on last december.

Palapa Ring (1)

I remembered when I was a teenager, the government was proposing a national broadband network called Nusantara-21 (N21). In an official document of the goverment, this concept was issued in 1988 (Wow!), about three years after Singapore launched its national IT plan. But I didn't hear it before the time where Singapore began its initiative SingaporeONE and Malaysia initiated the MSC project (surely several time after the Al Gore's 'Information Superhighway' speech :-D )

Singapore : The Regional Teletraffic Junction

For economical, political, geographical and possibly many other reasons Singapore has established itself as a major telecommunication hub in Asia. Almost all international submarine cables to/from Asia pass through, terminate in or branch to Singapore. This includes e.g. SMW3, SMW4, FLAG, TIC, EAC, C2Ccn, APCN. Singapore has three cable landing points. Cable landing stations in Tuas serve for cables coming from the west (Europe, Middle East, South Asia). Cables going to the East Asia, ASEAN, Australia and the US are originated from either Changi (eastern Singapore) or Katong (south).

Onnet vs. Offnet

This post shall actually be published one day in March :-) I haven't remembered precisely anymore the thing I want to address except that as indicated by the title. Maybe I'll just go for a rough idea.

I was trying to model traffic (relations, matrices, etc.) between operators. To obtain realistic results I had to assume a quite high factor for onnet traffic. That onnet traffic shall be higher than offnet, it is intuitively justified, because the operators always try to increase their customer base with many attractive marketing efforts, pricing schemes or other policies. Rough speaking, I had to use onnet factors in the range of 0.60 to 0.75. This was, informally, justified by some technical persons in the operators.

Indonesian Telcos : The Map (1)

In this post I want to give a global map of the current telecommunication players in Indonesia. This is not intended to give a complete profile of the telcos but just to implicitly mention how competitive is the domestic telecommunication market todays. The figure above shows the dominant players. Several facts are worth to be noted.

AAG : Something New ?

Several days ago I was 'googling' for the AAG - Asia America Gateway - submarine cable system. I just want to update myself with (and was expecting to find) some new information about it. Almost one year ago, I heard for the first time about this project just a while after many asian countries were healed / relaxed from the effect of the Taiwan's earthquake on Dec 2006. At that time, I wrote a short article about it in a local newspaper.

Indonesian Telcos' Customer Base (2006)

As of 12/2006, Indonesia has around 78 millions telecommunication subscribers. Since around 8 millions are fixed-line subscribers, 70 millions thereof are wireless and cellular telecommunication customers.

Metro and Access Infrastructures

In providing metro connectivity services, Telkom and Indosat are accompanied by other players. Although they have still a dominant market share, several ISPs and new entrants have entered this market in several cities, especially providing metro IP-based services.

Traditional fixed-line (telephone) access infrastructures are still (almost 100%) owned and operated by Telkom. Other operators including Indosat prioritized development in wireless fixed lines, which obviously need smaller capital investments.