Paul Abfalter, Director International at Telstrasaid:“Last year’s introduction of our ‘Always On’ service guarantee was targeted at customers with large capacity requirements of between 10GB and 1TB. We are now expanding this service by introducing lower bandwidth options from 1GB with the flexibility for customers to scale up as needed.” 

“This enhancement, combined with our ultra-low latency connectivity across these key routes will be particularly beneficial for organisations in the financial services industry, where speed and reliability between global financial hubs are vital,” he said.

Complementing the ‘Always On’ service, Telstra also has the lowest latency routes in the market between key financial hubs in the Asia Pacific region.

“We now have average speeds of 28.8m/s between the Singapore (SGX) and Hong Kong (HKEX) Exchanges, 177.8m/s between the Australian (ASX) and Chicago (CME) Exchanges, 178.2m/s between Equinix/CERMAK (EQCH) in Chicago and the ASX, and 41.9m/s and 13.9m/s respectively between Singapore to Taiwan and Hong Kong to Taiwan,” said Mr. Abfalter.

“Businesses expect to be able to connect anywhere at any time and meeting these expectations can be difficult when it comes to international connectivity. This is particularly the case in the Asia Pacific region where more than any other region globally, cables are at risk of service disruptions due to cable cuts caused by shipping activity, earthquakes and typhoons. Damage from these events can take weeks or sometimes months to fix.”

“We were first in the region to develop ‘resilience as a service’ across the busy Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan triangle so customer services are restored within hours for their subscribed bandwidth,using one primary path and two protection paths over different cable systems along the same route.”

“Customers also benefit from cost savings associated with managing multiple vendors and paying for spare capacity that may not be used, while the assured availability helps improve the experience they provide their end users,” said Mr. Abfalter.

Telstra’s subsea cable network is the largest and most diverse in the Asia Pacific, accounting for up to 30 per cent of active intra-regional capacity. It is this diversity that enables Telstra to reroute traffic impacted by a cable cut onto another path to minimise downtime.

“As cloud computing and the number and variety of digital devices in use worldwide continues to increase, so too does the demand for the international networks, like subsea cables, needed to keep them connected. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Asia, which is now home to almost half the world’s internet consumers and where tens of millions of new services are enabled every year,”said Mr. Abfalter.