Speculations on Google's peering timing

Take the following two events:

• Google should start peering locally "soon". [Events seem to have overtaken the original plans for implementation by the end of January, so perhaps mid-February?]
• SEACOM is coming online "in June".

These might seem unremarkable events individually but when viewed together they provoke interesting questions. At the root of all of these questions has to be some speculation regarding the timing of Google's technical entry into this market (ignoring their sales operation) prompted by this observation:
Local Google peering is very close to, but before, the SEACOM launch.

Some obvious simple questions, with possible answers:

• Q: Are Google using SAT-3 or SEACOM?
  
• A: Google is likely to be using SAT-3.
• It's unlikely that SEACOM have any segments finished and ready for operations yet.
• However Google probably don't need a full path from South Africa to London; the 'express path' to Kenya would help operations both in Kenya and in South Africa, so any costs involved in bringing content to Kenya or South Africa could be amortized over both operations.
• Google would also like some redundancy in their paths, especially considering the Egypt-to-France portion will be the responsibility of Egypt Telecom.
  
  
• Q: Does Google have a big pipe?
  
• A: Probably not.
• 10 Gbps IRUs are available on SEACOM, but SAT-3's total capacity is 120 Gbps. Even 1 Gbps is a large chunk of the available capacity.
• Pricing on SAT-3 circuits is also very high, although it'll be under pressure because of the imminent SEACOM launch.
• However, if Google have negotiated a long-term deal with Telkom, they may have secured better pricing.
• Presuming they buy a circuit on SEACOM, one assumes it will be a 10 Gbps IRU.
  
  
• Q: Why hasn't Google peered in South Africa before this?
• A: It was too expensive for the possible benefit to Google.
• ISPs must secure bandwidth to provide service to their customers. Those customers want connection to Google, so ISPs wanting to keep customers happy bought the bandwidth.
• Google started local [service / sales] operations a while back (witness the recent Yellow Pages / Entelligence / Google spat) and are ramping up their presence in the country. Further usage of YouTube, Google Earth & Google Maps, GMail and other bandwidth-intensive services would help drive traffic (and hence advertising earnings), and usage of Google Docs would help steal marketshare from Microsoft in a developing market that Microsoft itself recognises is vulnerable (hence Microsoft's pre-paid Office offering).
• Google can afford to run the service at a high marginal cost for a while, until SEACOM comes online.
• Also, it seems the development of the GGC has only recently come to fruition.
  
  
• Q: Why hasn't Google waited until June (e.g. for better pricing)?
• A: Competitive advantage.
• Come June, every Tom, Dick, Harry, Yahoo! and Microsoft will be presumably be buying large circuits to tie in local datacenters or extend peering.
• Moving first allows better publicity (even via word of mouth as opposed to above-the-line advertising) and can be used by their sales team as a competitive advantage.
  

Anything else?

More Firefox and ISA

The advice in the previous post about Firefox interacting badly with Microsoft ISA seems to be outdated.

The correct advice now:

1. Open (i.e. type) about:config in the location bar
2. Search for network.negotiate-auth.allow-proxies in the search bar
3. Double-click the line to set the value to false

You should now be able to enter your username/password combo once, have it remembered, and not be pestered with millions of pop-ups.

Firefox, Novell client, and Microsoft ISA, oh my!

If you want to access Internet resources from within UCT, you traverse some sort of proxy server.
For "performance reasons" UCT now use Microsoft ISA instead of Novell BorderManager.

UCT is reasonably enlightened, Mozilla Firefox is pre-installed.
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Hello? 1.0.8? Heckfire that's old!
In fact, 1.0.8 was released after the sunset announcement for the 1.0.x line.

So why not install 2.0.0.3 or even Gran Paradiso 3.0 Alpha 3 (handy-dandy LEG mirror for the UCT-enabled)? It works fine and most of the intranet stuff supports Firefox well.

BUT

Since we are using generally using NT 5 (er...Windows XP), ISA ends up trying to authenticate with the local workstation credentials, which are pretty useless as we don't login to the local workstation with our UCT credentials, but rather some stub account. So when you try surfing, you end up with an endless amount of popups asking for credentials for ISA. You can type in the correct[ed] version of your username and password, but even asking Password Manager to remember the password does not help.

The trick is to open the hardcore configuration (go to about:config) and search for network.auth.use-sspi and disable it. Then enter the username/password combo once and let it be remembered.

Et voilá!