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Engineer olympics peering

If you see a network engineer pat him on the back and buy him a beer – Olympics good job #LINX78

I’m at LINX78 the latest quarterly meeting of the London Internet Exchange. This meeting is particularly interesting because it comes immediately after the Olympics and its attendees represent the vast majority of UK internet access networks. In other words the people responsible for making your web browsing experience a good one during the Olympics were all here.

This community of engineers should stand up and take a bow as part of the team that made the event a total success. Whilst there will be the odd exception and glitch the network of UK plc performed incredibly well. From a personal perspective although I was on holiday I kept in touch with the office from time to time.  The level of support calls in to the Timico NOC was as we would normally expect and we got the additional network capacity planning just right which is hugely satisfying.

CEO John Souter described the “Olympic  effect” seen at LINX in the run up to the games. Since LINX77 in May the exchange has seen a 20% increase in traffic capacity growing from around 5Tbps to 6Tbps. In a single month over 60 10GigE ports were installed as part of a capacity growth that month of 800Gig (including the first 100Gig port connected by BT).

The rush was prompted by a June 19th cut-off date for new capacity needed before the 14th July Olympic change freeze at LINX.

If you need some perspective consider that the average UK broadband speed is less than 10Mbps. The 6Tbps capacity is the equivalent of over 600,000 broadband connections running flat out. It’s not really a good way of looking at it as there are many other factors that need to be considered – networks have alternative routes to the internet , broadband connections not running at capacity to name but two. However it is a testament to the efforts made by the UK network operator community to ensure that their contribution to the Olympics was a success.

Note I’m told that the Dept of Business Innovation and Skills (Vince’s lot) asked for a daily report on how the LINX network was performing – such is the critical nature of this infrastructure. LINX is going from strength to strength. The exchange currently has 431 members with 64 having joined this year (that’s up on the 49 new members for the whole of last year).

If you see a network engineer pat him on the back and buy him a beer (several beers knowing the engineers I know).

Categories
Engineer internet

Submarine Networks and targeted marketing

Submarine Networks World 2012, Marina Bay Sands, SingaporeThere is a big pile of junk mail in my pigeonhole – downstairs behind reception. This morning I took the unusual step of looking at it. I have to do this once in a while because every now and again something turns up that is not junk. Very infrequently.

Today it was, as usual, junk. One flyer did catch my eye though. An invitation to “Submarine Networks World 2012“. I noticed it because I thought it was a wonderfully badly targeted piece marketing – a good subject for a blog post. Maybe they saw my piece on the Virgin undersea cable near the Isle of Man and figured I would be a good guy to have along.

The flyer arrived airmail from Singapore. Hmm, Singapore eh? I quite like Singapore. Before Timico I did quite a bit of globetrotting in my job and Singapore was a paradise in the Far East that one could rest at between visiting countries where the signs were totally illegible to the Western eye. I used to stay at the Hyatt Grand Regency on Orchard. Beautiful hotel, great bar, fantastic service etc etc.

So now I’ve changed my mind and I’d like to go to the conference. I don’t want it to cost anything mind you. Certainly not the S$4,190 it costs to attend or the business class airfare (it’s a long flight and I need to be in the right frame of mind when I get there). I don’t even want to pay the S$319 room rate at the Marina Bay Sands Hotel though I’m sure that’s good value for the quality of the accommodation.

In fact I’ve convinced myself that this is the one conference I absolutely need to attend in September 2012. If someone will stump up the cash – £7k will probably cover it – I’ll go. In return I promise to write a blog post condensing  my learnings into three concise, highly readable and absolutely on the money paragraphs  that will save you the effort of having to go (there could be a business idea here 🙂 ). The post will undoubtedly include pictures of palm trees and the Indian Ocean (Pacific?).

All that aside this is still not very well targeted advertising. This is surely a business model that needs to change.

Categories
broadband Business

Grown Up Networks

I’ve started the process of cancelling some of our smaller connections to the BT ADSL network. We have newer bigger better pipes on order (in the pipeline 🙂 ). This is on top of the resilient Gigabit hostlinks we have into the BT 21CN network.

This really does feel as if Timico is growing up. When we started, in 2004, we had a single 34Mbps connection. By the middle of next year we should have resilient 2,000Mbps capacity. That’s a big change. Big growth. By the end of 2009 and beyond we should be into the realms of 20,000+Mbps. That’s 2 x 10Gbps. I left it expressed as Mbps for effective comparison. Quite dramatic I think.

At the same time the size of project we are handling is getting bigger and bigger. Although the majority of network customers are small with perhaps 2 or 3 sites, networks with hundreds of connections are becoming much more common and this year we have started talking to customers about projects involving thousands of sites.

Thats when life starts to get really interesting.