Developing A Palestinian Internet Backbone

Brief Analysis and Recommendations for The Palestine Telecommunications Company

By

Marwan Tarazi

Director of IT Unit

Birzeit University, Palestine

mtarazi@admin.birzeit.edu

Table of Contents

Introduction *

1 Palestinian Internet Usage Patterns. *

2 Existing Internet Infrastructure in PA areas. *

3 Connectivity Options Analysis: *

4 Connectivity Analysis: *

5 Summary: *

Introduction

The following report is a brief description of the status of the Palestinian Internet usage, services and service providers. The report includes suggestions and recommendation for the Palestine Telecommunications Company (PalTel) on how to develop the Palestinian Internet backbone.

This report is not a study. It does not include statistics or detailed figures. The purpose of the report is to provide ideas and guidelines that may be used as a basis for a comprehensive study, or to shed light on technical issues related to the subject.

1 Palestinian Internet Usage Patterns.

Before one is to is to begin discussing Internet connectivity in Palestine, it is important to define the local Internet community, and the Internet usage patterns.

• Like most developing countries, the great majority of the Palestinian Internet traffic is outgoing traffic destined to access information outside Palestine. Local traffic is negligible in comparison.

• Electronic mail usage is ever increasing and is one of the most important Internet services. There is a large professional and personal community that has totally integrated electronic mail in their daily communications utilities.

• A significant percentage of the traffic is consumed by traffic intensive entertainment downloads such as images and video.

• File transfers use another significant percentage.

• List serves and mailing lists are not very popular yet.

From the above trends one may draw the following conclusions:

1. Direct Internet access to the Internet backbone is essential and customer satisfaction will be directly affected by the performance of such a connection.
2. Cashing of Internet traffic will produce significant savings in expensive international traffic. Frequently visited sites and FTP sites will reside on the local cash servers, and access will be done locally.
3. A Palestinian Inter traffic exchange will not produce a significant savings in International bandwidth in the near future since local traffic exchange is small. However this situation is destined to change as Palestinian Internet usage and the number of users and services increase.
4. The emergence of local service providers that can capture a large portion of the entertainment and FTP markets will divert the expensive international traffic to the local traffic. It is important to note that there is much to be gained by this move by all parties involved including the end user, who will be getting much faster access.
5. There is no need for local high speed links for Internet usage (such as ISDN) in the near future, as the traffic bottlenecks lie within the International links and not between the end users and the service providers.

2 Existing Internet Infrastructure in PA areas.

Internet users in the PA areas are using the following media for communicating with their service providers:

1. Telephone lines using modems. This constitutes the greatest majority of Internet users, whether at home or in their businesses. These users use regular telephone lines to dial up to their service providers. Their use of the Internet is usually restricted by the following factors:

• The general shortage of telephone lines inhibits users from holding a telephone line that is used for other purposes for prolonged periods of Internet time.

• Up to date the greatest majority of Palestinian service providers are located in areas serviced by the Israeli Telecommunications Networks. This implies the clients are forced to make long distance calls to access these providers. This has a significant additional expense in telephone bills - another reason to economize in Internet usage.

• The poor quality of a significant number of the telephone lines directly impacts the quality and speed of the Internet connection and results in frequent loss of connection.

1. Satellite connections: This is a relatively versatile and inexpensive solution which uses VSAT. It is mainly used for on-line Internet services in areas that do not have other means of providing on-line Internet services. The main problem with this service is speed. Even though the company that offers this service claims to provide a down-link of 128Kbps (incoming traffic), and an up link of 38Kbps (outgoing traffic), the actual performance is much slower. It is very important to note that satellite technology is expected to play a very significant role in Internet traffic and services in the coming years. The Bill Gates project for building a network of low lying information satellites is just an example of what is to come at the start of the coming millenium.
2. Wireless Technology: This technology is playing an ever increasing role in the provision of Internet services in the PA areas. It is being used both by Internet service providers and customers that require larger on-line bandwidths (128K – 3Mbps range). The introduction of this technology to the PA areas at a large scale came as a direct result of the unavailability of leased or data communications lines. The extent of the use of wireless technology in the PA will largely depend on the quality and cost of the Internet services that will be provided by PalTel. In assessing the impact of wireless technology on data communications in the PA areas one is to consider the following factors:

• The proximity of areas serviced by Israeli telecommunications companies will always provide a backdoor for Palestinians living in the PA areas and who opt to use providers in the Israeli service areas.

• The advancement of the wireless technology is likely to make it’s range of service bigger, faster and cheaper. At present it is possible to obtain 256 Kbps at 20-30 Km ranges. This will make unrestricted access even easier and could cover a larger territory.

• Many of the wireless communications equipment use broadband frequencies difficult to detect or intercept. This will make regulating the use of this technology difficult.

1. Leased lines and dedicated lines: PalTel has recently finalized developing its data communications core network, and it is now possible to link almost all areas in Palestine together whether serviced by Palestinian or Israeli telecommunications operators. Internet service providers have not begun to make use of these services yet. One of the expected problems with inter-city leased lines at the moment is cost. The inter-city leased line costs are very high compared the prices offered by Israeli telecomm operators. At the same time, PalTel offers a service of intra-city dedicated (copper) lines at very attractive costs. Later on in the document, a proposal wibe made on how PalTel should be using this combination to offer a very attractive and competitive Internet backbone for the areas covered by its territory.

The Palestinian Internet service provider map is illustrated in the following diargram:

This map reveals the following information:

1. At present, all Palestinian service providers obtain their services from Israeli service providers. None of the Palestinian service providers share resources with the others (e.g. proxies, ftp sites, cross traffic routers).
2. Some ISPs have used wireless communications to setup servers in PA areas and offer direct dialup connectivity through these servers.
3. ISPs that offer services in multiple locations use the Israeli telecommunications network to connect sites together.
4. Some ISPs offer wireless Internet connections to large clients. The majority of such services are in the Ramallah and Jerusalem areas, and recently in Gaza.
5. The majority of the Palestinian cities do not have access to on-line Internet services. Internet usage in these areas are restricted to long distance dial up Internet access, or to satellite communications in some institutions.

3 Connectivity Options Analysis:

4 Connectivity Analysis:

It is clear from the above discussion that several options are available to PalTel's clients for Internet services. It is also clear that PalTel should develop a business plan that would suit its business interests. The most important recommendation for PalTel is to seek a solution that will not require its customers to seek alternate providers for their Internet connectivity. It is also very important that PalTel should aim not to resolve to regulatory or legal issues to prevent its clients from using backdoor methods for Internet connectivity (e.g. wireless technology). During the following brief analysis, it will be demonstrated how PalTel could easily provide strong and competitive Internet services while follow the above recommendations.

It is very strongly recommended that Paltel should not move into the end-user Internet service provision. It should focus its efforts on providing Internet to service providers and large customers (50 users and above). End-users require an enormous amount of support and services that Paltel needs not bother itself with. If these services are sold to ISPs, then competition will improve the quality of the services and drive down the prices for the end-users. This will have a positive impact on the development of Internet in Palestine, and will reflect positively on PalTel’s image.

It is recommended that PalTel uses the following structure in building its Internet backbone:

This diagram includes the following components:

1. Routers are installed at the main Palestinian cities where heavy Internet usage is expected. A main router will be installed in Ramallah through which a connection to the Internet is obtained. In the future, another connection may be obtained through another city for redundancy.
2. Given that inter-city traffic is expensive, and Internet traffic is even more expensive two methods will be used to conserve and optimize this traffic usage:

1. Large proxy servers will be installed at each router in each city. This will conserve Internet traffic within the local backbone. Another large proxy server will be installed at the main Internet router. This will conserve expensive Internet traffic.
2. Advanced routers with strong matching data compression modules will be used within the local backbone. This will at least quadruple the traffic throughput on the standard leased lines within the backbone. Data compression will greatly increase the throughput of the Palestinian cross-traffic, and will prevent it from interfering with the Internet traffic. This will increase the performance of the network and the overall bandwidth at almost no additional cost

1. Traffic Allocation and metering system: This will assign Internet traffic and meter usage on the network

There are clear advantages to adopting the above model in terms of efficiency in the utilization of bandwidth, and Paltel has much to gain from adopting it. However, more importantly, there are even greater gains to be made from the customer’s point of view:

1. Customers within a city will not have to use expensive inter-city leased lines. They will use local dedicated lines (at $40-80/month) or local leased lines at a fraction of the price of the inter-city leased line ($860 for 128K). This will significantly reduce the overall cost of the Internet (cost of leased line + cost of service), and will attract more customers. This will also give Paltel the edge over Israeli ISPs. If properly planned, this setup may make it even attractive for ISPs that operate in several cities to use Paltel’s backbone in each city for its Internet services (rather than using lease lines and building their own network).
2. There are several obvious and not as obvious advantages to a larger number of customers they are:

1. The larger the customer base, the larger the bandwidth that will be needed, the better margins that Paltel can make.
2. The larger the number of users, the more effective or efficient the proxy servers become (even though this may require larger servers). Traffic generated on the proxy server is pure profit.
3. The larger the number of users the more developed and advanced Internet usage becomes, the greater the demand on the bandwidth will become.
4. The larger the number of users, the larger the Palestinian cross traffic becomes, the higher the profit margins. Cross traffic is traffic generated between local nodes. Clients are charged Internet rates for this local traffic.
5. A large user base would provide PalTel with the opportunity to introduce new and more advanced data communications services.

5 Summary:

Paltel has a leading role to play in the development and advancement of Internet in Palestine. It is faced with the cof developing the infrastructure and providing the Internet services to the Palestinian population at prices that compete with those provided with a well-developed Israeli Internet market. With the monopoly rights over data communications in PA areas, PalTel does have a great opportunity of meeting these challenges and developing an advanced Internet environment for the Palestinian community.