APRICOT 2025 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) conference 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.