Extra transit for TENET

Viewing the monitoring graphs for TENET's London node, a new transit circuit through DataHop [web?]is apparent:


Peak speeds are about 50 Mbps. Combined with the Telia peak of ~100 Mbps, this means TENET currently has ~150 Mbps peak transit.

Note the very small outbound. Mmmm, eyeballs.

Unscheduled scheduled outages

A recent posting to the TENET ren-news list:

All Neotel MPLS GEN3 sites experienced a number of service failures
early yesterday morning. It appears that these were caused by Neotel
maintenance, of which TENET was not informed in advance.

even given

The Service Level Agreement provides that: "...The Providers will give TENET four days' advance notice of planned maintenance."

Let's hope Neotel doesn't become Neotelkom [the new Telkom?] :)

ICTS vs users

For some reason there is an article praising UCT ICTS's War on Terror...er...Bandwidth:

[snip lots]
ICTS has implemented Packeteer Packetshaper
[snip lots more]

AFAIK this actually happened ages ago. So there's no real reason to trot this out now unless people are griping that GEN3 isn't doing much for them.

And there's no mention of what will happen once:

• UCT transitions to SANReN and has a 10 Gbps link to the local node, and
• TENET moves to the 10 Gbps overseas pipe due mid-2009

I don't see the Packeteer appliance scaling to multi-Gbps speeds without serious extra $$$ invested. And would it be worth doing so?

Consider this paper on web search clickstreams http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1177080.1177110]:

The MWN [Munich Scientific Network] provides a 10Gbit/s singly-homed Internet connection to roughly 50,000 hosts at two major universities along with additional institutes; link utilization is typically only around 200–500 Mbit/s in each direction.

Now this might have been back in 2006; it doesn't really matter if the traffic demand has doubled since then. Also, since major local and international peering will then be in effect, actual transit pressure should decrease.

C'mon ICTS - plan ahead now!

Flatlining

With all of the negative feeling towards TENET and GEN3 because of the recent outages, I thought it might be quite amusing to show the reverse:



CPUT's main Bellville campus is obviously in need of more, More, MORE! bandwidth. Roll on, SANREN.

GEN3 failure

And so soon after the start of the service?

Hmmm, what does the SLA say about this? 99% uptime implies 1% downtime.

365 days x 24 hours x 1% = 87.60 hours down per year.

So they have loads of downtime left - bah humbug.

A quick estimation from the ML Sultan campus of DUT:


The interruption starts around 19h30 on the 5th of March, and lasts until about 09h30 on the 6th of March. That's 14 hours total. Ouch.

So we can look forward to another 73.6 hours of downtime. That's another 3 days left!

GEN3 draft SLA

GEN3's draft SLA is available (and claims to have been posted on 27th February).
Interesting to see specific figures. I'm intrigued to see that 260 ms RTT 'average'.

5. Availability

The Providers commit to the following levels of service element availability:

Services provided by Neotel:99%

Services provided by Internet Solutions:

International services: 99.8%

National services: 99.95%

6. Response times (“RTT”)

The Providers commit to the following network RTT averages:

Services provided by Neotel: 150 ms

Services provided by Internet Solutions:

International services: 260 ms

National services: 35 ms (services provided out of Rosebank)

50 ms (services provided out of Cape Town)

7. Packet loss

The providers commit to confining packet loss to the following levels:

Services provided by Neotel: 1%

Services provided by Internet Solutions:

International services: 1.5%

National services: 2%

Developments on GEN3 and SANREN

According to the latest Rhodes IT minutes, they expect to increase their bandwidth radically:
4.5 Mbps of international bandwidth x a 35 fold increase in ... Internet bandwidth yields 155 Mbps - an OC3. In 2008! At least South Africa isn't too far behind the times ;)

Does this mean UCT will be getting a similar capacity, or something a little faster? Since we'll be near one of the cores of SANREN, hopefully things will be a bit better.

Also, ITWeb thinks SANREN will be a 10 Gbps network (presumably per link, not in aggregate). Note also the proximity to JINX - that should offload some of the transit requirements to direct peering. Also, the projected operational date is end 2008! (a bit earlier than previously thought, and also overlapping with GEN3's mandate with TENET).

Also also, the Infraco weirdness with cabling up the west coast to Europe and South America should matter a little less with the redundant path on SEACOM that TENET has purchased the rights to use.

So, perhaps academic and high speed networking in South Africa has a bright future after all?