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Sharks ate our data

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Nicko van Someren at Absolute Software explains the value of network resilience in a work-from-anywhere world

 

In Vietnam, sharks have a taste for internet cables which contain our data, biting into the cables on a regular basis, and damaging our perceived network strength as a result.

 

Vietnam is connected to neighbouring countries via the internet mainly through two large cable connections in and out of the country. These signals contain electrical signals, with packets of data, and power running through the fibre optic cable bundle to the repeaters.

 

The sensitivity of sharks to the vibrations and electrical disturbances, which they use to hunt their prey in deep, dark waters, gets triggered by the electrical signals in these cables, encouraging them to take a bite.

 

Absolute Software’s Vietnam office frequently report that a shark will bite the cable, thinking it’s their prey, causing one of the two main undersea cables to go down, compromising the internet connection and performance for the local region.

 

On average, there have been 10 cable incidents a year for the past five years, with cables being bitten by sharks, as well as cables being stolen to sell on. In one incident, 11 km of cable worth $6.8 million was cut up by people to sell as scrap.

 

Typically, it is a complex process, over many weeks, to repair these cables and restore full operational capacity, first needing to identify where the issue in the cable is, before using a boat and an autonomous submarine to lift the cable to the surface, repair it, and then gently restore it to the ocean floor.

 

The impact of packet loss

When someone sends an input to a network, a packet of data containing the request as well as the user information is sent to the relevant location to carry out that request. This occurs when a search is made on the internet for example.

 

When an internet cable is damaged, or bitten by a shark, it causes data packets to go missing as they cannot travel through the network to the relevant location.

 

On a typical network, when there is a flow of data and these data packets go missing, software will eventually detect that the packet has gone missing, but this often causes a dip in the perceived strength of the network connection, causing delays on the user interface.

 

Once a packet is identified as missing, the packet will then attempt to re-transmit via another route. However, this causes a backlog in the pipeline as the flow of data has been disrupted.

 

Packet loss is one of the biggest factors in the perceived quality of a network connection. If a small fraction of the packet is lost it causes a large bubble in the pipeline as it tries to re-transmit the packet.

 

The importance of traffic management and a resilient network

When one of the two big internet connections goes down in Vietnam, for example, there is both the reduction in throughput of data packets, as well as an increase in the frequency of lost data packets because the entire system gets so congested – leading to a dramatic fall off in the perceived performance of the network connection and the measured performance of certain types of connection.

 

Traffic from the first cable is then added on to the traffic from the second cable, increasing the amount of data being transmitted and therefore slowing down the data flow.

 

This is also the case when large groups of people use the internet on their phones in a stadium venue, for example, causing an increase and large volume of network traffic, slowing the flow of data.

 

The solution is network resilience which leverages forward error correction to improve the detection of lost packets, locating issues faster and more accurately in the data flow.

 

Therefore, lost packets can be identified very quickly, and more often than not don’t require re-transmission as the error correction data can work out the missing data, reducing the congestion issues associated with re-transmission and ensuring the perceived network connection remains strong.

 

Naturally, this is particularly important for the police, for example, when they are communicating in the field and require a highly reliable connection.

 

The impact of an effective network resiliency and traffic management solution is significant. A member of staff from Absolute Software’s team in Vietnam reported that download rates from the Vancouver office quadrupled when using the Absolute Secure Access VPN, as opposed to using a Cisco VPN, highlighting the impact of having a resilient network connection.

 

We now live in a work from anywhere (WFA) world with workers being increasingly more mobile, working on the end of poor internet connection and moving to different locations regularly, all of which contributes to a degradation in packet loss which leads to poor performance.

 

Ensuring a resilient network connection, by identifying where issues are as well as how to fix them, is more crucial than ever to maintaining operation efficiency and productivity regardless of where staff are logging in.

 


 

Nicko van Someren is a veteran of the cyber security industry with over three decades of experience before becoming Chief Technology Officer at Absolute Software

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com

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