Maps of terrestrial fibre networks aren’t great. The Internet Society wants to fix that

APRICOT The Internet Society wants to help improve maps that depict terrestrial optic fibre networks by having regulators and carriers alike promote and adopt the Open Fibre Data Standard it helped to create.

Internet Society senior director Steve Song on Monday explained that the standard was developed partly in response to his efforts to map Africa’s terrestrial fibre networks.

Speaking remotely on Monday at the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Song explained those efforts were not easy because African carriers – like many others around the world – share different amounts of info about their infrastructure in varying formats. Some share nothing, and after years of effort he was able to map perhaps 70 percent of the continent’s fibre infrastructure.

Song’s work eventually came to the attention of the Internet Society (ISOC), the Mozilla Foundation and even the World Bank, which decided to develop a standard way to describe terrestrial fibre networks.

A standard to do so is needed, he argued, because submarine cables are already well-understood and mapped at resources like the Submarine Cable Map.

Fibres laid on land, however, are often obscure. Plenty aren’t mapped at all. Others are mapped but without useful info like capacity, how many fibre pairs they employ, or whether they’re discrete links or shared capacity. He shared the example of a map published by Brazil’s telecoms regulator that shows nine carriers claim to have fibre links between the cities of Sao Paulo and Rio De Janeiro, without detailing if each is a physical fibre, or capacity on a rival company’s fibre. He thinks there are probably three or four cable operators between the cities, and the others shown on the map are either resellers that have purchased capacity or dark fibres.

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Song argued that such maps are little use to buyers, who don’t know what they’re getting. He also worries they mean governments can’t understand the true state of local networks and therefore can’t make accurate assessments of the national data grid’s resilience. Investors can also struggle to see where opportunities may exist, which he feels disadvantages small ISPs that serve rural and remote areas.

Open Fibre Data Standard (OFDS) aims to address such issues by at least giving carriers a common language with which to describe their infrastructure. Getting them to use it is another matter. Song told the conference he hopes telecoms regulators will require carriers to share network info and to describe it in OFDS, then make it available for others to use.

He dismissed concerns that detailed maps of fibre infrastructure has security implications, citing Ukrainian carriers that continued publishing detailed

The Standard is now at version 0.3, and is completely usable, but isn’t yet widely adopted.

Song recently moved from Mozilla to ISOC to help advance OFDS.

“The goal is to actively develop the standard this year, working with standards organisations and partners around the world,” he told the APRICOT crowd. ®