John Linton I was 'tidying up' some of the predicted new technology investments for 2008 earlier this morning and my thoughts drifted back to the agonising we went through some 18 months ago in trying to decide on whether Exetel should invest a lot of money (for us) in then new technologies being offered by tiny start up companies that had no presence in Australia. The results of those investments are now becoming fully implemented and they have been, by any reckoning, spectacularly successful.
We are reaching the end of the second major part of preparing Exetel to handle the 'legitimate' use of P2P and handling the current 'illegitimate' use is very effective practice. I'm now relatively satisfied that its possible to not only reduce the costs previously involved in handling P2P traffic by 2/3 of the cost 12 months ago but it's possible to do that while delivering an overall much faster P2P service. We still have a few things to do to finally satisfy ourselves that what we set out to do was possible but, if everything goes the way it looks as ithough it should, then we will have achieved the objective of reducing the cost of delivering P2P traffic by 75% while doubling the average speed of delivery.
I don't think anything we've done is particularly innovative other than we used really 'bleeding' edge solutions to accomplish it and I am still mildly amused at the 'hue and cry' (in some quarters) when we announced we were going to embark on this program. Some of the more puerile 'huffings and puffings' in US web publications were quite abusive. I also talk to the CEOs of the companies that we took a risk with when they had very little installed and am pleased that their sales have 'boomed' since Exetel 'pioneered' using their services in Australia.
If I remember correctly, and maybe I don't, I think that many of the larger ISPs contributed to the streams of negative invective directed at Exetel for taking the very sensible actions it took 12 months ago to find a real and sustainable way of handling the changed network loadings that a growing use of P2P exerted on EVERY ISP's network provisioning as well as the global internet. Perhaps you might remember the holier than thou statements from some of the larger ISPS about how they didn't and never would "prioritise/de-prioritise" P2P traffic because "our networks are fully able to handle whatever P2P traffic we carry".
How laughable and pointlessly stupid.
As I continue to keep in contact with the companies that supply such products to Exetel as well as the others we considered I think it would be interesting for the users of ADSL services in Australia to know which, if any, ISP in the largest 20 DOESN'T use an Allot Net Enforcer or one of Allot's competitor's products
My understanding is there is now NOT ONE.
I wonder if I'll receive any apologies or retractions from those ISPs who while trying to denigrate Exetel for doing, as Basil Fawlty has been known to remark, "the bleeding obvious" - were frantically trying to find out how they could achieve the savings that Exetel was so open about saying were available to them as soon as possible.
My guess is none.
Exetel publicised its own use of the Allot products so openly because it was entirely in our own interests that Allot should survive and develop their products and the more customers they had the more likely they were to do this and do it more quickly. Giving away some free "confidential Exetel information" was the easiest way of doing this and so it has proved - with many Australian ISPs buying Net Enforcers following Exetel's widely publicised glowing praise for the financial benefits. Making those ISPs who derided the use of P2P filtering and then sneakily implementing it was also always going to be an added bonus as they subsequently had to admit they lied to their own customers while abusing Exetel - they are, and always have been a bunch of shallow, "follow the leader" charlatans.
(Disagree? let me have your nomination for ANY innovation any of them ever introduced over the past five years)
We have taken the same path with the implementation of the PeerApp P2P caching solution - widely publicising our use of it and making as much information as possible available to any ISP who cared to read it. Like Allot, PeerApp needs more sales to survive and grow and its entirely in Exetel's best interests to assist that happen if we can.
We will begin the caching of non P2P content later this month with the activation of an Akamai server cluster which is mainly aimed at speeding streaming video such as UTube as well as providing the local distribution of many major software title updates. We are expecting that the Akamai cluster and/or our own mirror developments will result in our ability to provide movies and TV shows on demand much more cost effectively moving in to the second half of 2008 - but that is by no means certain.
There are a number of new technologies/products now emerging (some even supported by the major copyright holders) that we are interested in bringing in to our network delivery systems and we will begin sending engineers to Israel and the US in the near future to get a better understanding of what could be used by Exetel.