Organizers: Spilios E. Makris, Nick Lordi, and Arun Handa, Telcordia Technologies, USA
In December 2006, a series of undersea cable outages after an earthquake near Taiwan led to significant disruptions to international communications. These disruptions were widespread and large enough to cause a substantial shortage of international bandwidth and significant network congestion as traffic was rerouted to the remaining operating undersea cable systems.
This industry forum will:
· Explore the major issues facing service providers and large enterprise networks, such as global financial institutions, as they seek ways to ensure a diverse, resilient end-to-end global infrastructure, as well as how their suppliers are helping them face these challenges.
· Identify and understand potential geographic vulnerabilities as a precursor to a comprehensive vulnerability assessment of the ones undersea cable infrastructure, consisting of cable landing stations, cable segments and supporting infrastructure.
· Discuss diversity, which is often limited at cable landing stations and deep sea cable paths. Specifically,
o How can a service provider or financial institution ensure global diversity for their physical and logical paths?
o How can other assets, such as telecommunications “hotels” be used to enhance undersea cable infrastructure diversity?
o How do you mitigate risk, with diverse physical routes, logical routes, data backup sites, and in what combination?
· Identify potential undersea cable infrastructure mitigation strategies in conjunction with industry and the challenges associated with the implementation of such strategies is a crucial first step in mitigating risk. In particular,
o How does one “build in” resiliency to your network assets?
o What assets could one use, from a service provider and equipment vendor, to facilitate resiliency?
· Discuss recent efforts at the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) Performance, Reliability, and Quality Committee (PRQC) to standardize metrics in an effort to ensure robust UCI and the end-to-end integrity of the global telecommunications network infrastructure and explore how we could leverage that PRQC work to promote international adoption of UCI-related ATIS Standard?
Moderator: Nick Lordi, Chief Scientist, Telcordia Technologies, USA
Panelists:
Ronald J. Rapp, Director, Cable Engineering and Technology, TE SubCom
Peter Cornell, Vice President, Global Network Field Operations, AT&T
Alasdair Wilkie, Director, Marine & Projects, Hibernia Atlantic
Andy Yates, Global Head of Network Architecture, Internal Technology, NYSE Euronext
