"Window to Europe"
On June 8th, CJSC RASCOM has celebrated an important anniversary - 15 years since the company was established. As of today, RASCOM is a well known provider of international capacity for Russian telecommunications carriers. Not only is Rascom successfully developing, but, is leading in introducing the most up-to-date technologies, too.
CJSC RASCOM has been established in 1993. Even though Rascom was the first telecomm operator to have built a fiber-optic communications line (FOCL) in 1994, its road toward the telecomm market place was not too easy. The route of building the FOCL was in big demand: Saint-Petersburg - Moscow. Digital international telecomm channels were quite rare at the time. Then, Russian telecomm carriers have been using analog channels for the business, and, making decision on start using new technologies nobody has ever tried or tested in Russia was very difficult.
For strange it might seem today, a very big and intense work was needed to show potential customers all advantages of digital technologies, FOCL and its reliability. After some time, CJSC RASCOM acquired acknowledgment among traditional authoritative telecomm companies. Russian operators, who could evaluate the convenience, the services and high quality level of the technologies being used have become loyal customers and, more and more, are leasing bandwidth from Rascom rather than from any other provider.
By 1998, still going forward, Rascom has extended the geography of its network, by building a FOCL at the routes from Saint-Petersburg to the Russian-Finnish Border and from Saint-Petersburg to Veliky Novgorod. The Conmpany has survived a difficult period in the history of Russia, economic crisis of 1998. While numerous entreprises died, Rascom has not only kept its position at the market place, but, furthermore, still worked on extending its customer base, increasing sales volume and network capacity. In September 1998, the company has up-graded data transmission system from STM4 to STM16 at the route Saint-Petersburg - Russian-Finnish Border. Beside it, RASCOM considered it affordable, even at that time, with all the economic hardships the country faced, to keep its attitude as of a leader in the field of introducing the most up-to-date technologies: it was the fiurst company in Russiato use the DWDM in 1999-2001 in Russia.
Until 2004, Rascom was operating its own backbone network at the route Moscow - Saint-Petersburg- Russian-Finnish Border, and to establish international channels it had to buy capacity from international telecomm carriers. In 2004, the company has created a long-term business development strategy whose target was to build iuts own network in Europe. The first step to implement the strategy was to launch the company's own foreign nodes of communications in Stockholm and Frankfurt. As development directions, the most demanded routes for international capacity ordered from Moscow and Saint-Petersburg were chosen. Major telecomm network centers are located in Stockholm and Frankfurt, so the capacities toiward these cities are in big demand.
During the second phase of its international extension program inmplementation, Rascom has extended its Russian segment of the DWDM network from the State Border to Stockholm. This section was the first element of the network that Rascom has built outside Russian Federation. Basing on this network section, Rascom continued to provide SDH and VPN lease and backbone Internet access services. But, since those services, now, did not include foreign providers' capacity, and rather were exclusively based on the company's own resources, the service delivery term has been drastically shortened and monitoring level became even higher.
The volume of traffic transmitted over year has been doubling as compared to the past year indices. Meanwhile, the existing capacity is significantly limiting the volumes of traffic transmitted which can lead to remarkable quality degradation of the services provided. At the same time, the operators face more and more problems to handle the increasing volume of video-traffic. Applications grow more popular with the users that are intended for watching video over the Internet, high-definition video transmission volumes increase, more and more people communicate over Internet in social networks. In parallel to this, corporate networks' traffic is constantly growing due to growth of business-services spectrum offered and increase of virtual private networks number. With this situation, the operators try and do their best to increase, to maximum, the primary communications networks bandwidth in order not to let happen quality degradation nor traffic transmission rate decrease.
To solve the problem, in 2007-2008, Rascom has installed, on its network, the latestdevelopment of the company NORTEL: a system based on the solution Common Photonic Layer (CPL). It is with this system that Rascom was the first in Euirope to have installed the transponders featuring a bandwidth of 40 Gbps that increase the capacity of a wavelength from 10 Gbps to 40 Gbps. This four-times increase permits to use a DWDM network with the highest efficiency and increase its capacity without need to place a new fiber. This opportunity is very important for the company as a modern network not only has to meet the existing needs of its customers, but rather be flexible under conditions of consdtant bandwidth growth.
Today, at the whole length of the Rascom network, the equipment used permits to use up to 72 wavelengths in one fiber while having a total system capacity of 2880 Gbps and more. By installing a new CPL system on its network, Rascom has, for nearest future, solved the problem of increasing the capacity, i.e., the company has drastically reduced service delivery time at all of its PoPs. Beside this, thanks to using advanced technologies, Rascom has, since 2007, started to offer, to its customers, international channels with a capacity of 10 Gbps. In 2008, the company will deliver first international 40 Gbps channel. There is a contract signed with a customer for this capacity, already.
For next years, Rascom is planning to continue the development of its network of backbone access in Central European Region and Scandinavia. Projects are under consideration to increase the power of the existing nodes in Stockholm, Frankfurt and Helsinki ad open new ones in london and Amsterdam.