Ramping up Research Traffic on SEACOM

While TENET has enjoyed high-speed interchange of traffic with GÉANT before, it has mostly been from its nodes co-located in London (e.g. local mirrors).

However, it looks like things are heating up - traffic of up to 700 Mbps between the SANReN ring in Gauteng...

and GÉANT in Europe...

Interestingly, none of the TENET graphs show which client networks this is going to, so perhaps this is just an internal test or mirror population?

UCT's extra bandwidth redux

[from a comment on the last post:]

Of course, SANREN is what's supposed to provide the drastically improved last-mile.

SANReN will eventually provide the core of the new network, and maybe the access leg too. Some Gauteng institutions have access via the fibre ring there and are happy. Many large institutions elsewhere don't have that yet (and are waiting, waiting, waiting) and are unhappy.

However, if the UCT link was increased from ~32 to ~44 Mbps (coincidentally this is like going from an E3 to a DS-3), what's to prevent it from being increased further? Why not a DS-4 (~274 Mbps) :)

BTW, the Google caches are already live. [We don't know for sure that these are GGCs, but see below ] Their effectiveness seems to be improving (presumably their caches are still filling), but they do still use quite a lot of incoming (international) bandwidth.

If these are Google caches (GGCs), I doubt they will have reduced international bandwidth usage much. The local usage would spike because access is so much quicker and easier.

Traceroute (ICMP, rather than UDP) to v1.cache.googlevideo.com

mt.google.com is also mapping to a TENET IP block, so Google Maps tiles should be served from somewhere local [TENET or GGC or who-knows-what].

kh.google.com [Google Earth] is still mapping to the Google IP addresses overseas.

mail.google.com and docs.google.com still map to the Google IP blocks overseas.

So either TENET has some sort of fancy caching and line-rate traffic redirection going on, or Google is doing something interesting.

Hopefully the local build-out will be finished soon.

Science bandwidth requirements estimate

A recent e-mail from a Meraka engineer working on SANReN:

We know eVLBI would require a 1Gb all the way to Amsterdam, current projections for full SKA is 100GB international capacity, the MeerKAT project will probably require 10GB of bandwidth.

So something like the 'bandwidth glut' of Infraco would definitely be required.

It seems like the only people talking about having too many cables are those with a vested interest in having only a few [competing] cables.

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!

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?