In the Spotlight: Virtela's Bill Dodds

As a managed service provider, Virtela operates a virtual network, using the physical facilities from a broad array of partners to serve multinational corporations, including the increasingly popular undersea cable routes. The recent cable cuts in the Mideast raised concerns about the security and reliability of global networks and services, which Virtela Co-President Bill Dodds discussed with Editor-in-Chief Carol Wilson.

On the likelihood of four cable cuts in one area: I haven’t seen multiple ships take out multiple cables before. I know there are some things that we don’t yet know, but this wasn’t something we’ve seen before.

On the impact at Virtela: Our monitoring system sends out alarms. We are constantly monitoring all of our paths. We took alarms and started addressing it right away. We started moving everybody’s traffic onto other routes. For the first 10 minutes, it looked like a regular alarm, then we started getting multiple alarms.

On the possibility of traffic outages: We have multiple routes out of our regional policy centers. They are all on different carriers. It is standard operating procedure for us on a service disruption or high latency to re-route customers over another backbone link, with about an 80 millisecond re-route delay.

On the impact of this outage: We were pretty fortunate -- a couple of our service providers had good redundancy. We have land-based alternatives to undersea cables. For two to three hours, we saw 10 to 20 milliseconds of additional latency. That is pretty insignificant compared to a hard down.

On the advantages of a ‘virtual’ network: We have multiple paths between all of our nodes. A facilities-based provider might have to re-route on less desirable path -- they may have to go around the globe to get back to the other side. Our path is on the same geography so our latency is less. For example, if the cut is on the link between Mumbai to London, we are still routed from Mumbai to London, just on another provider. Someone else might have to go through North America to get from Mumbai to London. We definitely believe in our architecture model. I don’t want to say we’re great and everyone else stinks. But events like this [multiple cable cuts] are the kinds of things that prove that facilities-based folks are a lilt more exposed because they don’t have access to other carriers’ backbones.

Over general concerns about this grouping of cable cuts in the Middle East: I do believe the telecom community is on high alert. That is a unique part of the world – there are not a lot of good cable routes in that part of the world because of the political situation. You wouldn’t see this kind of isolation if it happened in North America, the Asia Pacific or Latin America. We are still waiting to see what happened. It could just be a nasty coincidence.