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Location: Philippines
Industry: Telecommunications
Challenges
Growing demand for bandwidth motivated TelicPhil to undertake its third backbone expansion since 2004, with the objectives of providing added resiliency in the core backbone and meeting growing demand for high-bandwidth connectivity in Mindinao in the southern Philippines.
Solution
TelicPhil deployed ECI’s XDM® converged Multi-Service Provisioning Platform (MSPP) and All- Range™ wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) for this network expansion.
Results
The “third wave” network expansion enables expansion of the NDTN to a 160 Gbps DWDM network, allowing TelicPhil to cost effectively deliver increased capacity for bandwidth-intensive voice, data, and video services to customers across the southern Philippines.
Building a national backbone
The Philippines is an archipelago nation of over 80 million people and 7,000 islands stretching 1,850 kilometers up and down the southwestern rim of the Pacific Ocean. But the country and its growing economy had only one telecommunications backbone network until 1999, when the Telecoms Infrastructure Corporation of the Philippines (TelicPhil) was formed. TelicPhil is a consortium of telephone companies who came together to build a second national backbone network to respond to fast growing demand for telecommunications capacity. Called the National Digital Transmission Network (NDTN), this fiber optic backbone of microwave, submarine, and land cable covers a distance of over 2,700 kilometers.
As the network continues to grow, it is increasingly critical to ensure full resiliency and redundancy, because any downtime impacts thousands of users. The Philippines are in an area of the Pacific Ocean in which typhoons and earthquakes are common, making resiliency on the core backbone a critical requirement.
The third wave
In 2007, TelicPhil initiated the third network expansion to the NDTN since 2004... all carried out with the help of ECI Telecom. There were two driving factors for the 2007 expansion: to enhance the backbone to support load balancing and provide added resiliency in the core backbone – resiliency that is critical to TelicPhil’s business – and to expand capacity to meet growing demand for high bandwidth connectivity in the Southern Philippines.
As it had for the previous upgrades, TelicPhil selected ECI’s optical solution for the NDTN expansion. This phase of the network expansion includes a 16-channel, 10 Gbps dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) backbone that enables TelicPhil to cost-effectively deliver increased capacity for bandwidth-intensive voice, data and video services to business and residential users across the southern Philippines. TelicPhil deployed ECI’s XDM converged MSPP and All-Range WDM for this network expansion. Previously, the network connecting the Mindanao islands had a transmission capacity of only 2.5 Gbps, and was not able to meet increasing user demand for high-bandwidth services. The XDM network backbone is comprised of STM-64 10 Gbps channels. These transmission links are supported by multiple state-of-the-art DWDM technologies, including ECI’s high power erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs), Raman optical amplifiers, and advanced signal modulation and coding techniques, making it possible to cost-effectively bridge long distances, including island hopping.
The expansion includes several additional 10 Gbps wavelengths, empowering the network with significant additional strength to haul voice, data and Internet traffic to and from major points to the rest of the country. This expansion will meet the continuously growing demand for high bandwidth connectivity in the country. To allow the company to access previously unused capacity, in phases two and three of the NDTN expansion a pair of XDMs were utilized as digital cross-connects to groom traffic from TelicPhil’s legacy system.
Why TelicPhil chose ECI
TelicPhil chose the XDM platform because it enables expansion of the NDTN to a 160 Gbps DWDM network while bridging the challenging distances for island hopping, thus making more services available to users. Furthermore, the highly flexible XDM gives TelicPhil the ability to support multiple interfaces like SDH/SONET, Ethernet, PDH, DWDM and easily add new services efficiently, while providing link resiliency.
As a provider of core backbone services, TelicPhil must guarantee a certain service level to all the co-owners. To meet this requirement, TelicPhil needed a technology partner who could provide a robust and reliable infrastructure. The ability of ECI’s equipment to provide high availability and resiliency were key factors in TelicPhil’s buying decision. ECI provided a proven platform that offered the high link resiliency and full circuit protection crucial to TelicPhil’s business.
“Having worked with ECI on the previous two NTDN expansions, we have great confidence in the equipment and solutions offered and its people,” said Henry Galingan, President and General Manager of TelicPhil. “From the beginning, ECI has been an excellent partner, providing high quality service, constant support and timely solutions to fit our needs.” The ECI equipment also offers a small footprint and high density, enabling TelicPhil to increase network capacity without adding new cabinets or shelves. The innovative design of ECI’s XDM platform enables capacity expansion on a modular basis, so TelicPhil can build as they grow. The expansion modules can be inserted and provisioned dynamically, minimizing down time on the network.
ECI and TelicPhil working together
The NDTN is an important resource to the growing economy of the Philippines, and ECI played a valuable role in the network’s development.
From its inception, the availability of a second backbone provided the Philippine wireline and wireless operators a redundant path to direct traffic. It also helped lower operating expenses. Prior to NDTN being set up, the revenue sharing model was 30% transmitting, 40% backbone, and 30% receiving. Given that the NDTN is a shared network, each operator enjoys lower operating expenses, with savings proportionate to the investment made in the infrastructure. From a capital expenditure perspective, NDTN offers a lower barrier of entry to national backbone build-out through a shared investment model.
In 2004, as the thriving economy drove demand for bandwidth, the capacity of the original 2.5 Gbps NDTN was almost full. The system needed to be expanded, increasing the network to a 10 Gbps system, using a DWDM platform. ECI delivered the XDM converged optical network solution, which enabled TelicPhil to upgrade the entire network to 10 Gbps. A year later, in 2005, TelicPhil, again working with ECI, increased the capacity of the link between Manila-Cebu to support the rising volume of data and voice traffic.
The Philippines has one of the highest numbers of mobile users in Asia, and Short Message Service (SMS) is one of the nation’s popular means of communication. With the network evolving so quickly, TelicPhil needs a flexible platform that is able to scale and evolve with its business. “The modular and capacity provisioning approach to the design of the XDM playform makes possible the quick activation of additional capacities when needed, offering on-demand bandwidth capability,” said TelicPhil’s Henry Galingan.
TelicPhil today and into the future
Today, NDTN is the second largest fiber optic backbone in Philippines. It was originally built to trunk voice traffic. With the advent of multimedia traffic—Internet, VoIP, video—the NDTN is required to support different types of services. ECI’s XDM multi-service platform enabled TelicPhil to add new services progressively over time. Mr. Tunde Fafunwa, Chief Executive Consultant for consortium partner Bayan, explained, “The enhanced network can now provide a more robust and reliable infrastructure to support the delivery of emerging technologies such as VoIP, wireless broadband and other high bandwidth services nationwide that will give BPOs (business process outsourcers) and other businesses higher monetary and operational returns from their technology investments.”
The Philippines Department of Trade and Industry indicates that the country’s outsourcing business is projected to earn $12.4 billion by 2010 from an estimated $3.63 billion in revenue in 2006. With that, the demand for bandwidth would progressively increase. And as the Filipino population becomes savvier with the Internet, the advent of IP-centric applications and services will continue to fuel the growth of the NDTN in the years to come.
“This is one of the largest network backbones in the Philippines,” said Galingan. “Our selection of ECI to play a critical role in the project demonstrates the flexibility of ECI’s optical platform to assist in complex environments while connecting new regions to greater global communications.”
About Telecoms Infrastructure Corporation of the Philippines (TelicPhil)
TelicPhil was formed to act as maintenance contractor of the National Digital Transmission Network (NDTN), the country’s second privately owned telecommunications backbone. It is a joint project of seven enfranchised telecom companies. Launched in 1999, the NDTN links the country to deliver transmission of telephone long distance services, cellular traffic, high-speed data, video, Internet, broadcast signals, and other communication services.
"Having worked with ECI on the previous two NTDN expansions, we have great confidence in the equipment and solutions offered and its people. From the beginning, ECI has been an excellent partner, providing high quality service, constant support and timely solutions to fit our needs."