June 26, 2019 - Telstra has switched on its ‘Always on’ automatic restoration service on across Asia’s busiest routes - reducing restoration time from eight hours to just minutes. Announced by Telstra, Ericsson and Ciena in January, the upgrades offer automatic restoration and continuous resiliency as a service on the Singapore to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to Japan, and Japan to Singapore routes. Telstra’s Head of Connectivity and Platforms, Nadya Melic, said “Not only are these some of the busiest routes in Asia, they are also some of the most challenging and unreliable environments for subsea cable systems.” “Typically, customers would have a ‘work’ path and a ‘protect’ path for business continuity reasons. Both paths require equipment on them at all times. This can result in high, ongoing costs for resiliency. Our ownership and management of assets allows us to reduce that cost by moving equipment from one cable to another to restore services if one fails,” Ms Melic said. Telstra’s extensive end-to-end ownership of assets enables it to offer unique propositions in Asia Pacific such as a commitment to meeting bandwidth availability service levels on Asia’s sub-sea cable routes. Due to the amount of shipping and fishing activity in region, availability on Intra-Asia routes can be up to around 89%, however, the ‘Always on’ service has allowed Telstra to improve this by on average 20%. ‘Always on’ also provides Telstra’s carrier customers with the capability to improve SLAs to their customers on these paths. It also gives content providers the freedom to improve their cloud and internet performance to better ensure reliability on their E2E propositions to market. The ‘Always on’ connection service has already delivered benefits to an extensive range of customers, including financial services organisations, carriers, and cloud services providers that has saved time, money and improved the experience they provide end users. Telstra recently provided this service to a global cloud and software company when it experienced disruption on its cable routes to the US and were able to turn up capacity and restore the links to Asia in just minutes, providing much needed reliability and security for the company. The partners announced the live status of the service ahead of this week’s International Telecommunication Week (ITW) conference in Atlanta.