Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Google's local servers

I don't know how this slipped by me, but it's finally appeared in my Google Alerts:

Stafford Masie of Google SA at a MyADSL conference in November 2007 [thanks ITWeb]
“We are going to establish a point of presence in this country, which means the international bandwidth problem is solved. There will be a big announcement in a month,” Masie said at the time.
Google do host a lot of bandwidth-intensive services, and having these served locally will help a lot with latency (for the cached stuff, of course) and cheaper bandwidth, especially for consumers.

Those local-only ADSL accounts are starting to look great. Telkom's partial-compliance with the ICASA rulings on local bandwidth will help too. Perhaps using Stefano's DSL split-routing setup will become more commonplace.

Of course, a month from November 2007 was December 2007 or, charitably, January 2008. Still no word though. Google - what news?



Let's see, the more bandwidth-intensive Google services are:

Monday, February 04, 2008

Night-time power usage, redux

So the newspapers [Business Report, at least] have finally caught up.
Power rationing could result in demand for electricity falling by between 10 percent and 20 percent if successful and could dent Eskom's revenue, presenting further difficulty in funding the company's capital expansion.
You read it here first, folks! So I've been ahead of the game on that call :) I look forward to breaking many more stories for y'all.

Roll on Electric-gates!