Telecommunication failures rectified

Telecommunication failures rectified

By Reiner Simanjuntak

SINGAPORE (JP): New telecommunications technology has offered
telecom carriers a cheaper and more resilient way to increase
their network capacity in transmitting voice and data signals, to
meet the rising demand on telecom services like Internet, tele-
banking and other multimedia applications.

According to experts at a conference on transmission
technology held in Singapore last week, among its many promises,
the advancing technology puts an end to huge economic losses due
to telecommunications failure caused by rising traffic.

The seminar was sponsored by giant telecom equipment-makers
Alcatel and Lucent Technologies.

One of the latest transmission technologies is the Synchronous
Digital Hierarchy (SDH) system, or its U.S. equivalent,
Synchronous Optical Network (SONET), which has been increasingly
applied by telecom carriers worldwide.

Laurie Doyle, of Alcatel's transmission division system,
pointing out the estimated large business losses incurred by
telecommunications failure, said an important feature of SDH is
the prevention of this through its self-healing protection and
automatic restoration mechanism.

He cited the 1987 average loss figure in the U.S., which was
$3 million per hour for a major airline carrier, and $6 million
per hour in a financial or trading institution.

Because of SDH's reliability, network operators would no
longer need to have their maintenance crew working round the
clock to fix network problems.

SDH also has the flexibility to adjust the network in a timely
way to react to traffic changes as demand for telecom services
rises. For past transmission networks, setting up a new end-user
service would need a new network, which could take weeks or even
months to install.

"The SDH network provides transverse compatibility between
equipment produced by different manufacturers. The entire
communications stream would no longer have to be torn apart and
reassembled every time a signal has to be added or dropped,"
Doyle said

Instead, the signals are collected and routed through a
grooming mechanism within a synchronous frame, he explained.

Another important feature of SDH is a lower cost of ownership
thanks to its centralized network management.

The centralized management can greatly accelerate the
provision of new services, allowing telecom operators to start
new source of earnings much sooner.

This system could also determine the quality of services
provided and measure slow resource degradation, thereby helping
to anticipate future maintenance requirements before a fault
actually occurs.

Alcatel's business development and communications director,
Mario Pagani, said: "The SDH technology is future proof
investment as it can be used together with the Wavelength
Division Multiplexing (WDM) technology."

The WDM system is another transmission breakthrough boosting
the transmission capacity by reusing the installed optical
fibers, especially in metropolitan networks which have begun to
show signs of fiber congestion.

The use of this new system is expected to increase over the
next few years when a more sophisticated networking system,
called "all-optical networks", is commercially available,
providing the potential to manage and deliver an unprecedented
amount of bandwidth capacity.

The highest transmission rate under the SDH system mostly used
today is at 2.4 gigabits per second (Gbps); 10 Gbps capacity is
also available.

By combining SDH with WDM, the capacity could be boosted to
400 Gbps per fiber.

Alcatel is the leader in the transmission systems market,
holding 28 percent of market share worldwide. By far, Alcatel has
the largest installed base of optical networks in the European
market.

The company is currently involved in the world's longest and
most complex undersea fiber optic telecom system, which stretches
more than 30,000 km, connecting the Pacific Rim, Southeast Asia,
the Middle East and Western Europe.

By combining the use of SDH and WDM, the project is capable of
carrying 500,000 telephone conversations simultaneously.

Alcatel is the major supplier of SDH and WDM equipment,
undersea cables and electronics.

Customer testing of the project is scheduled for the middle of
1998, with the first part of the network scheduled to enter
service at the end of the year.

In Indonesia, Alcatel's SDH system is being used to develop PT
Telkom's network in Java; PT Indosat's backbone network
connecting Jakarta-Surabaya; and in several other transmission
projects.

About 50 percent of Indonesia's telecommunications network has
been installed using SDH, with several new transmission projects
to be tendered soon, including installing a WDM system in the
Maluku-Irian Jaya regional network.