inter-domain link recovery

Wed Aug 15 13:54:26 UTC 2007

> I think the real question given the facts around this is 
> whether South East Asia will look to protect against a future 
> failure by providing new routes that circumvent single points 
> of failure such as the Luzon straights at Taiwan. But that 
> costs a lot of money .. so the futures not hopeful!

In addition to the existing (fairly new) Rostelekom fiber vie Heihe,
there is a new 10G fiber build by China Unicom and the Russian company
TTC. On the Russian side, TTC is a fully owned subsidiary of the Russian
Railways which means that they have full access to Russia's extensive
rail network rights-of-way. Russia is a huge country and except for a
small are in the west (known as continental Europe) the rail network is
the main means of transport. It's a bit like the excellent European
railways except with huge railcars like in North America. I think that
TTC will become the main land route from the far East into Europe
because of this. 

Compare this map of the Trans-Baikal region railroad with the Google
satellite images of the area.
http://branch.rzd.ru/wps/PA_1_0_M1/FileDownload?vp=2&col_id=121&id=9173

The Unicom/TTC project is coming across the Chinese border on the second
spur from the lower right corner. It's actually a cross-border line, the
map just doesn't show the Chinese railways. If you go to the 7th level
of zoom-in on Google Maps, the first Russian town that shows on the
Chinese border (Blagoveshchensk) is where the fibre line will cross.

--Michael Dillon