GEN2 to GEN3

Is UCT currently operating on both GEN2 and GEN3?

Compare GEN2 stats vs GEN3 stats:

The big view seems to indicate traffic starting sometime in Week 07, about Tuesday:


The uncommissioned orders page shows UCT's link to become active on 1st March, 2008. So maybe it's all testing traffic.

It's interesting to see the TENET-JINX graphs too:
Note that we're not seeing massive usage through JINX. This basically boils down to two costs as limiting factors:
1) The equivalent-line-charge
2) The ISPA category charge (small, medium, large)

Now TENET is an honorary ISPA member, so presumably doesn't have to pay the small [by comparison] R6100 pm. But there's an incredible step function in the Equivalent Line Charge going from R0 per month to R22k per month as you transgress 2 Mbps. So can we assume private peering in/near the JINX facility?

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?

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

• GMail
• Picasa and PicasaWeb and Image Search
  
• Docs (watch out Microsoft - your anti-piracy drive may backfire)
• Maps
• Google Video (and does this mean YouTube will be served locally too? What about Limelight?)
• Google Earth (mmmmmm)
• full list of all services
  

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!

AMS-IX tops 400 Gbps

AMS-IX finally tops 400 Gbps (this happened a few days back, but it's taken me a while to get in front of a PC):


Now the daily graph does only show a 395 Gbps maximum, so this could be [partially] an aliasing issue, but I think it's safe to say that the milestone is passed.

Eskom vs corporate consumers

Why are people so upset with office blocks leaving lights on the whole night?

It's not like Eskom can save all of that power for use during the day; Palmiet can only generate a modest amount of power: the 2 turbines are only 200 MW each.

And who else is using lots of power at night? Not household consumers. So there is more than enough to go around at that time.

And who else is using lots of power during the day? Not household consumers. Many of them are at work / school / out-of-the-house.

So the primary contention-period is during early-morning periods (with hot water cylinders, kettles, and microwave ovens going mad) or evening periods (with hot water cylinders, stoves/microwave ovens, televisions*, and heaters/airconditioning being the primary culprits). And many people are early into their offices (I used to get in before 6am myself sometimes) and leave late (oh those productive captains-of-industry). So I don't think many people would complain about power usage in offices during those periods.

So what's all the complaining really about?
"Those people have lights while we don't. They don't need the lights and we do. They suck."

Back in reality, we should encourage conspicuous consumption by large corporates. I would love them to be sucking down as much juice as possible during the quiet period, as this means more demand - AND MORE PROFIT - for Eskom. Would you rather have Eskom build all of those new power-plants purely from your tax money, or from the profit they have earned off other people's excess consumption? No one else needs that power in the middle of the night.


* - Have you noticed that the power-consumption-warnings on TV say to turn off all nonessential appliances except your TV? Hmmm...