Southern Cross offers ISPs free backup on international links

Stuart Corner
Monday, 03 November 2008 07:49

Business IT - Networking

Southern Cross Cable - the main link carrying much of Australia's Internet traffic to and from the US is offering its ISP customers backup capacity at no additional charge, following a recent upgrade, which has  seen the operator cut prices by at least 44 percent.

The Southern Cross cable links Sydney to the US West Coast via two completely separate routes enabling customers to buy back up capacity on the alternate route.

For customers operating this configuration Southern Cross claims "five nines" (99.999 percent) availability, in contrast to most single route cable systems which, averaged over several years manage about 98 percent availability.

However, Australia's highly competitive broadband market - where consumers are demanding ever higher monthly gigabyte quotas for the same or lower prices - has put pressure on ISPs to cut costs and, according to Southern Cross' director of sales and marketing, Ross Pfeffer, many now take capacity on both routes of Southern Cross but use both routes for live traffic.

He explained that many are operating their circuits at or near full capacity, so in the event of a failure of one link of Southern Cross, customers of those ISPs would experience a significant degradation of service.

Pfeffer said that Southern Cross was concerned that such events would reflect badly on its reputation for reliability and that such usage was contrary to the original intent of Southern Cross' designers which had been to offer full diverse route redundancy and five nines reliability.

Accordingly it has decided to include restoration capacity at no additional charge on all new capacity purchases and will upgrade existing services with the facility at no additional charge, for one year.
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