Winners

41 42AUG 2014

By Jason Patterson Editor: Julia yaohaifei@huawei.com

MegaFon is in the midst of a massive undertaking – a single optical transport network that spans from China to Germany. A bridge between the East and the West, if you will. What is most significant about this link, beyond the fact that this land route is inherently more reliable than the undersea cables that global communications largely depend on, is the fact that guarantees can be made on an unprecedented scale and level of convenience, giving “end-to-end” a whole new meaning.

Hong Kong to Frankfurt in 88msMegaFon’s DREAM

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41 42AUG 2014

A new silk road

R ussian telco MegaFon is carrying out an unprecedented network buildout, under the clever acronym of DREAM (Diverse Route for European and Asian Markets).

When asked for details, Carrier Relations Director Alexander Teremetsky stated that, “Traffic volume transferred from Europe to Asia grows every year. Russia is located between two major economic centers, which create a logical conduit for traffic transfers between Europe from one side and Asia (China, South Korea, Japan) from the other side. MegaFon’s backbone route passes through Kazakhstan, Russia, and three other countries in Eastern Europe before ending in Germany. The length of the DREAM route is 8700km from Frankfurt am Main to the Kazakhstan/China border. DREAM will be used for the transfer of all types of telecom traffic between Europe and Asia and has a potential traffic transfer capacity of up to 8Tbps.”

When asked about who MegaFon sees as benef i t ing f rom this project arrangement, Teremetsky answered, “Our project mainly focuses on leading international European and Asian telecom operators. By having a flexible approach in providing channels from 1Gbps up to 10Gbps capacity, our product can attract not only telecom operators but also large B2B customers that require minimum traffic delivery delay from Europe to Asia. Therefore, we hope that our DREAM project may be included in portfolios

By having a flexible approach in providing channels from 1Gbps up to 10Gbps capacity, DREAM can attract not only telecom operators but also large B2B customers that require minimum traffic delivery delay from Europe to Asia.

– Alexander Teremetsky, Carrier Relations Director, MegaFon

Alexander Teremetsky

Winners

43 44AUG 2014

MegaFon’s business partners can now provide a real competitive advantage for their customers. Financial institutions, online traders and Internet companies can respond faster to any market changes.

of major international operators who will then sell it to their B2B customers. We already have several such companies connected to the DREAM infrastructure.”

The three primary advantages of DREAM over alternative routes are speed, flexibility and reliability. When asked which advantage was most important, Teremetsky chose the latter (in fact the “diverse” part of the DREAM acronym refers to the fact that it offers an overland alternative) as he considered the conditions in place with the DREAM route far more reliable than the rough & tumble world of undersea cables.

A hard-knocks life

Long-haul undersea cables are absolutely vital to the global economy, but they are surprisingly vulnerable to disruption; about 100 to 200 of them break each year. Most of these disruptions are manmade, caused by boat anchorage or fishing activities, affecting only a single line and thus going largely unnoticed by the average Internet user. But natural causes can be a whole other thing altogether.

On the night of December 26th, 2006, an earthquake struck off the southern coast of Taiwan that damaged eight undersea communications cables that link various parts of Asia. This editor, who was living in Taiwan at the time, remembers this incident vividly as I happened to travel to Hong Kong the very next day on an unrelated matter and, much to my surprise and chagrin,

had my SIM card rendered totally useless by the disruption for most of December 27th, leaving me unable to contact friends whom I was depending on for a place to stay that night. Not only did the quake ruin my day, it ruined the days of telcos and financial institutions all around East Asia, and Internet delays were felt for weeks afterwards.

Fortunately, disruptions of this scale are relatively rare, but unfortunately, undersea network bottlenecks in seismic hotspots are not rare enough, and the increasingly integrated nature of the global economy will make the next major disruption far more costly. MegaFon’s alternative route is all the more attractive because it provides 8700km of overland connection across areas of little to no seismic activity.

Every millisecond helps

The other major advantage of DREAM is speed. According to Alexander Teremetsky, “DREAM is the most efficient traffic route having the shortest round trip delay between Frankfurt am Main/Hong Kong section. The round trip delay here is only 175 versus 195ms from other operators.”

That makes for ten milliseconds saved each way, enabled by ultra-long-haul dense-wavelength divis ion-duplexing (UHL-DWDM) paired with coherent technology. What can those ten milliseconds get you? Quite a lot if you play the stock market.

High-frequency trading, on the order of 3000+ trades per second, is an integral element of global

43 44AUG 2014

finance (estimates have stated that 60 to 73% of U.S. equity is moved through such trades). A ten millisecond advantage at such a speed gets you an extra 30+ trades. Would financial houses pay for such an advantage? You bet. According to Bloomberg, trading firms are known to pay to have their servers placed in the same data center as the relevant stock exchange the shares are trading on, shaving an infinitesimal yet vital amount off of the elapsed time; every little bit helps, and not just a single type of customer.

According to Teremetsky, this speed advantage means that “MegaFon’s business partners can (now) provide a real competitive advantage for their customers. Financial institutions, online traders and Internet companies can respond faster to any market changes.”

A one-stop experience

MegaFon refers to the DREAM network as a “one-stop shopping experience.” When asked to elaborate, Teremetsky said, “MegaFon is the sole supplier to the capacity customers throughout the entire DREAM route, from commercial collaboration issues, to service support and SLA.” Given the fact that six countries are traversed a long th i s backbone network , that would certainly seem to simplify things, but the story does not end there; the China section of the route, which ends in Hong Kong, though not owned by MegaFon, is still guaranteed by the operator in terms of bandwidth diversity and the

other relevant factors. This degree of end-to-end integrity makes MegaFon no longer just a regional player, but in fact a global one, even more so once the alternative route through Scandinavia is added. With both online, DREAM will prove a vital artery of the global economy – an agile innovation serving agile innovators.

When asked about what DREAM means to MegaFon, Teremetsky declared, “Before 2013, MegaFon did not have a Europe-Asia traffic transit capacity segment present in its product range. Now, having closed this gap, we can confidently state that MegaFon has become a full-fledged player on the international transit market. We hope that our DREAM project may be included in the portfolios of major international operators who will then sell it to their B2B customers. In fact, we already have several such companies. DREAM is a significant growth factor for our carrier business. It is one-of-a-kind on the market.”

About MegaFon

MegaFon is a leading Russian operator of mobile 2G, 3G and LTE. As of April 20, 2014, MegaFon has the largest LTE network in Russia, providing services in 53 of the country’s 85 regions and accounting for more than 40% of the population. On February 25, 2014, the company put its LTE-Advanced Cat.6 into commercial use in Moscow which, according to the Global Mobile Suppliers Association, is the fastest commercial mobile data network in the world, reaching 300Mbps.