As a result of the exponential growth of the Internet worldwide, the last few years have witnessed a marked increase in domestic demand for international access to Internet backbones. Operating as the PT group’s international carrier, Marconi has managed to satisfy this demand by leasing international circuits to Internet Service Providers ( ISPs), mainly to the United States and Northern Europe.

So as to provide a more competitive solution in terms of price, quality and ease of management, an international access platform to Internet backbones was developed during 1998. The idea was to build on the traditional solution, providing enhanced means of transmission for the transport and management of service providers’ IP traffic. Using fully redundant state-of-the-art technology, the platform allows a range of new services to be provided, with fast installation time, the ability to detect and resolve IP transit problems, IP routing management and assured uptime (figure 1).

The international Internet access service MARCONI INTERNET DIRECT (MID)was developed on this platform. The service was launched in November at Expotelecom’98 (Lisboa - Portugal) and quickly caught on in the ISP market thanks to its quality, transparency, integrated supply, proactive commercial activity and the support provided by highly skilled and experienced technical staff.

The increase in IP traffic allowed us to provide a greater number of high bandwidth international connections at the start of this year, and to conclude peering agreements with various telecommunications operators in Europe and South America ( figure 2). This has helped increase the security of the MID service, keep transit delays to a minimum and reduce bottlenecks.

The supply of MID services can grow on demand and respond to the rapid growth of the Internet. MID makes use of a network of submarine cables co-owned by MARCONI and satellite systems belonging to organisations of which MARCONI is a member. International capacity is expected to rise during the year with the coming into service of the latest generation submarine systems: Columbus III and Atlantis 2.

Responding to the specific needs of the ISP market, the MID service is available in several versions: MID Prime, MID CableSat, MID Global and MID Newsfeed – all of which were formally launched at Internet World’99 Portugal (Lisboa - Portugal), held at the end of last April. Together they provide a wide range of solutions: cable access, hybrid cable/satellite access and a dedicated USENET newsfeed between the MARCONI platform and the client server. MID Global was developed to focus on the overseas market, Africa in particular.

Launched less than a year ago in a now partially liberalised market, MID is already a resounding success and is the first choice of a considerable number of national ISPs, handling high volumes of international Internet traffic.