John Linton
....until one of our NW engineers provided a consolidated MRTG report.
Any Exetel customer (and of course employee) has access to the main MRTG reports that provide 'minute by minute' utilisation information on all of our different links between our customers in different States and Territories and on our different services as well as our links to the 'outside world'. I can remember, and it was not very long ago at all, that Steve proudly sent me an email with an MRTG report that showed we had switched over 1 gbps for the first time. It was even more recently that I received an email with a report showing that we had switched over 2 gbps for the first time.
The new MRTG report shows what amount of traffic we are now delivering to our customers combining the new PoP's links from Pipe and WAIX as well as the contributions from the PeerApp and Akamai caching clusters in Sydney - which show a astonishing 3 gbps plus of traffic being delivered to our customers last night. Now the Akamai/PeerApp/WAIX/Pipe traffic has always been delivered and separate graphs show the amounts but we had never combined those caching feeds in to our overall 'picture' before.
What it means is that we have 2 gbps of 'raw' IP data (1.5 gbps from Verizon and 500 mbps from Optus) and now slightly more than an additional 1 gbps from the different caching and peering points. The peering and caching is providing one third of our customer's needs and, because the cost of that data ranges from $90.00 per mbps to much less than $10.00 per mbps it reduces the total cost per gigabyte delivered to a customer substantially.
Together with the progressively lower prices for 'raw IP' data it makes an enormous difference to the cost of providing a broadband service - which is just as well because what these figures also show is that "on average" a customer is downloading around three and a half times more each month than they did when we commenced in business in early 2004 - an average of 6 gigabytes a month compared to 1.7 gigabytes a month in March 2004. This in turn means, despite all of the economies of scale (reflected in IP buy prices and slight reductions in ADSL port costs) it is more expensive to provide an end user service today than it was 4 years ago.
Sad but true.
As IP pricing continues to fall we really don't expect that to result in lower service prices because the actual 'average' customer continues to require more downloads - as internet use more and more involves streaming video and the fact that graphics keep adding 'bulk' to previous versions.
We are slowly coming to grips with how to get more efficiency from the different caching 'engines' we have deployed over the past 12 months and are, finally, seeing much more positive results that go some way to ameliorating the pain we have suffered along the way from the 'vagaries' of the software and our own inabilities and lack of skills. We have also got a lot of value from the Allot boxes in 'pushing' excessive downloads in to 'quieter periods' of bandwidth use and this has made our bandwidth usage far more efficient; now reaching close to 90% utilization rather than the low 70%s we were achieving before that.
Adding the additional PoPs in the other States and Territories has added another level of complexity to what we do on a day to day basis as has the ongoing duplication of the Sydney main PoP with the second PoP we activated last year. VoIP services are also growing far more rapidly over the past 6 months and the additional equipment and links and lines needed for these services also adds a different type of complexity in providing those services. Similarly the SMS service (now approaching 500,000 messages a month and the calling card services are adding significantly to the voice minute traffic we are switching for Exetel customers.
We will trial a Cisco protocol based router solution (a 2 gb version was loaned to us yesterday) to determine whether it is better than the Allot solution we currently have in place and whether it operates without as much 'hand holding' and sporadic 'hissy fits'. If that works out we will 'live trial' it in Melbourne later this year and then have to consider whether or not to add that sort of capability to the inter State PoPs. Controlling, much more exactly than we do now, P2P traffic is going to be important, not only because of its effect on bandwidth usage, but because of the possible implications of future changes to the ways P2P is used generally and the ways that specific types of P2P are used. These issues were one of the reasons we chose to become familiar with this sort of network 'management'.
If the current growth in new customers continues at the current record (for us) pace we will soon think of 3 gbps as very ho hum in the future, but at the moment it's quite amazing to see just how far Exetel has come since the first ADSL1 application was received in February 2004.