Get in Touch
Get in Touch

Blog

A day without 24%

March 28, 2016

Genius Wong   

Genius Wong, Executive Vice President – Core and Next-Gen Connectivity Services, and Chief Technology Officer

Imagine a Monday like any other. Your alarm clock jolts you awake, you rub your eyes, and get ready to take on the day. Only today is a little different. Today, you’re only going to work with 76% of the things you usually count on. Which means 24% of the things you need to conduct 100% of your daily tasks will be missing.

That means your coffee maker will produce 16-ounces of coffee through only 76% of the machine, making your coffee taste both watery and full of coffee grounds. Your shower head will have 24% missing, causing the water to spray out in crazy directions, drenching the entire length of your bathroom.

Your commute will be a bit hectic too. As you’re driving down the freeway you see that one out of four lanes has been blocked off for construction, which means bumper-to-bumper traffic, causing you to be late for work.

After work, you make it home, hungry from a hard day of sifting through spreadsheets. The pizza delivery man arrives with the bad news that your pie is under-cooked because 24% of the oven is broken. After re-heating the pizza, you sit down to your favorite TV drama on Netflix, which is taking longer to load because only 76% of your TV cords are working.

Turns out, that 24% makes a huge difference.

That’s a little like what life would be like without Tata Communications’ global network. Today,  Internet  traffic travels over Tata Communications’ network, which makes up 24% of the world’s internet routes. Imagine life without access to 24% of the world’s internet routes? Your emails would be received much later than intended and you would experience the haunting buffer symbol every time you tried to video chat.

Our global infrastructure comprises one of the largest and most sophisticated subsea optic fibre cable networks on earth. That amount of fibre is enough to wrap itself around the earth 15 times, but we use it to connect six continents together. In fact, we control over 130,000 miles of fibre cables and 400 PoPs, reaching more than 240 countries and territories as well as nearly 1 million square feet of data centre and collocation space worldwide.

How does the vastness of our network affect you on your typical Monday? For starters, we carry 53 billion minutes of international wholesale voice traffic annually – that’s 1 in 10 voice calls globally – and 7,600 petabytes of data on our internet backbone monthly. That means that right now, more than 100,000 of you are calling another country using our voice network. That’s in addition to 15+ terabits/s of international bandwidth lit capacity.

That’s day-to-day life for our teams worldwide at Tata Communications. With that 24% added in, the Internet becomes a much more efficient and complete picture. However, we can’t guarantee a dry bathroom, less traffic and properly-cooked pizza.

Take a look a at a map of our subsea optic fibre cable network. How would your day be impacted with only 76% of the internet? Leave a comment below.