Acorn vs Apple

I find it amusing that Apple's new iPad uses a chip christened the A4, considering they released the Newton right around the time that Acorn released the Acorn A4 laptop...

History [pdf!]

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?

Return of CINX

The ISPA has re-launched CINX (the Cape Town Internet Exchange). PR here.

Nothing on the old CINX and why it was discontinued, except for a rather oblique statement that there is now has "more than enough Internet traffic to justify an exchange for the city".

No graphs for the exchange yet, but the TENET folks are on the ball and you can view their port graphs here. 10 Mbps in Cape Town doesn't seem like much compared to the 100 Mbps of JINX (which looks suspiciously flat, although there is a 175 Mbps spike in there).

Excellent news for local providers.

End of an era

TENET now runs all institutional traffic over SEACOM:

Bandwidth usage on the SAT-3 portions has dwindled to almost nothing; the SAT-3 connectivity should terminate sometime in the next month or so.

Interesting to see some BGP traffic on the Telia backup link - perhaps routing changes to some of the institutional ASs propagating through and settling down?

Google preparing for full roll-out?

Google shuffles around some more DNS records et voilá:

• mail.google.com now resolves to a Google-owned IP (one of the cpt01s01 series)
• mt.google.com now resolves to a Google-owned IP (as above, so below)

Was the hosting of the Google Maps tiles on the [presumed] GGC caching box just a fig-leaf, a ploy for respectability? Since only YouTube access still seems to be directed towards those caching boxen, perhaps that traffic was a quite-substantial chunk of the original Google traffic to TENET's network, the rest of which is now easily handled by the local peering arrangement.

It might allow easier filtering or shaping for the IT/ICTS departments so inclined, but why else keep the YouTube traffic on those boxes? Google's purported 'boxenertia'?

However, seeing that GMail is now locally hosted, that means the major services are being served from local machines. Perhaps this means Google is getting ready for a full-bore load test, in preparation for a proper roll-out?