John Linton
....Oh for the good old days when all you needed was "more bandwidth".
I knew I was always going to regret making Exetel's simple life more complicated by activating more than one PoP and using more than two "IP" providers but I am continually surprised at how much more complicated running a data service has become over the past two years. I'm not sure whether I'm just suffering from 'change overload' which will gradually go away as we become more used to the effects of the constant changes we have made over the past 18 months or whether this headache caused by trying to get my mind around the much more complex business and technical decisions that are now involved in operating a small communications company will remain or, God forbid, become worse.
We are entering the third phase of re-developing the core network services that provide Exetel customers with access to the multiplicity of uses they require from their comms provider. We still have several 'loose ends' to tie up in terms of fully integrating the new PeerApp services with the NetEnforcer services and the about to be activated Akamai caching services and that is behind the original schedule of full completion by 31/1/08. Hopefully it will be fully implemented by the end of February.
Yesterday we began to place the orders for new GigE connectivity in the second Sydney PoP having recently completed adding a second GigE for NSW ADSL1 traffic into that PoP. This is part of the painful process of building out the second Sydney PoP to allow eventual full redundancy of all NSW services - NSW being three times bigger in terms of users and traffic than all other parts of Australia combined. The increasing volumes of SMS, VoIP and Fax traffic is also requiring hardware and bandwidth and PRI upgrades at a faster rate than we initially expected.
We will also complete the rationalisation of our 'raw' IP delivery services by moving from two providers to a singe supplier (with diverse international paths and separate feeds) by the end of 2008 which will, in some ways, be the only 'simplification' we are able to achieve in the ever growing complexity of our core network facilities.
Our main new technical challenges over the balance of this financial year are centred around significantly expanding the mirrored and cached services that we have in place by a factor of ten. We have been, very slowly, developing an Exetel mirror as the third component of the P2P filtering and now P2P caching program. We put the mirror development on hold while we determine the actual results of providing the Akamai service from the Sydney PoPs but will resume, and accelerate that program as soon as the Akamai cluster is fully operational.
The purposes of the Akamai, mirrored and new HTTP caching services are to provide faster streaming video to Exetel users as well as eliminating the trans-Pacific latencies involved in non-cached video streams - specifically Myface and UTube but also the new services that are just beginning to become available.
We will finalise all of the new contracts for the additional/new infrastructures we have been discussing with various providers by COB today and will then 'fine tune' the implementation schedules based on what those final decisions are.
All of this becomes more complicated with the possibility that we will buy our own CBD floor space and move one of our current Sydney PoPs to our own data centre late in 2008. It seems inevitable that we will, for some time have to run three PoPs in Sydney as to move the current services is going to be very difficult and will need to be done very slowly.
All this may become even more complicated if we do in fact find a data over 3/4G solution in the not too distant future. I had expected to get some better indication of whether that will be a reality by yesterday evening but it didn't transpire.
...and I've run out of Neurofin again........