News
Verizon Business Receives Security Clearance From Government of India to Operate International Gateways
March 2009 by Emmanuelle Lamandé
Verizon Business has received approval from the government of India’s Department of Telecommunications to operate the company’s two international gateways in Mumbai and Chennai, under its international long-distance license. The approval allows Verizon Business to offer its suite of private line services to multinational customers and to activate the company’s wholly owned submarine cable capacity to India, providing direct connections to Verizon’s global network.
International gateways are transmission devices and switches that enable telecom companies to carry international communications traffic across country borders. By operating its own gateways in India, Verizon Business will retain full control of its international network capacity into and out of India and of its global Private IP and Private Line services. As a result, the company will be better able to monitor end-to-end network performance and product delivery.
Prior to receiving routine security clearance from the Indian government to operate the gateways, Verizon Business had to route its international traffic through local Indian telecom carriers.
Since receiving its international and national long-distance licenses in India in January 2008, Verizon Business has begun an aggressive infrastructure expansion. The company deployed a Private IP multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) network in five major cities in India: Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai and New Delhi.
The network nodes in each city — located in key technical sites where multiple service providers have easy access to the Verizon Business network — allow access using both TDM (time division multiplexing) and Ethernet technologies. The company began offering Private IP services under its own licenses on July 1, 2008.
The gateway approval also gives Verizon Business the opportunity to maximize its investment in the 20,000-kilometer (12,000-mile) Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4 undersea cable network and other submarine cables including the Europe India Gateway (EIG), currently under construction, from the United Kingdom to India. Verizon Business is the only U.S.-based company that is a member of the SEA-ME-WE-4 cable consortium. The company can now activate wholly owned capacity on SEA-ME-WE-4 and other existing submarine cables into India. The EIG submarine cable network is scheduled to be in service in 2010.
The company will continue its aggressive expansion in India this year by deploying a new Private IP MPLS node in Pune during the second half of 2009, expanding its backbone network and rolling out new services for multinational customers with operations in India, as well as India-based companies.
