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Thursday 9 October 2003

Internet over ethernet, history becomes the future. [brit]

I had an interesting, albeit 5 hour long, meeting this morning with a possible new connectivity provider.
The incumbent provider manages 2 * 2MB active lines into the building (500 people + ancillaries) in addition to providing a 34MB tail, should we want it - legacy agreements state that this provider has always been renewed in contract terms and as you can imagine, such a service is costly.
Anyhow, we've been looking at internet via ethernet of late, and this morning we assembled the crack technical squad and deployed to the offices of exponential-e; a fairly new (founded 2000) technology company with some pretty impressive stats and a fluid and equally impressive sales patter.
I'll cut to the chase; how does a 10MB line for £18,000 a year strike you? It struck us as pretty awesome; given that the likes of BT and MCI Worldcom will charge you about the same for a fifth of that.
So, the meeting went on, the network and company history was explained and then we got to see it in action - I ran three tests... first up, Apple.com's movie trailer site; the Kill Bill trailer (largest possible size) initialised and ran almost immediately - the file itself which must easily be in excess of 50MB, streamed flawlessly.
Next, a MS Windows update download - some 70MB which even though it was coming from MS's servers stateside, whacked out an impressive sustained 1.05mb/s throughput and delivered the entire file in under a minute.. my mind immediately thought of gaming patches, demos, and pings. Naturally.
A colleague of mine wanted additional proof - so he got it; the first Redhat 8 .iso (disc 1) from Redhat's .ac.uk mirror in the UK; some 670MB. How long? 9 minutes. It actually took longer for Windows to copy it to the desktop from temporary storage than it did to download. Impressive stuff.
The problem is, I came away thinking it's all a bit good to be true. Granted, you can't get it to your home and they are pitching solely at Medium -> Large enterprises, but even so - this much bandwidth on a guaranteed legacy debt and technology free network for that price? My Cynic Protocol has been blaring at me all afternoon.
The throttling and routing options were extremely impressive too; implentation of an address-space specific VLAN solution within your 'cloud', based on service access and tied down to MAC address and IP.. within 2 hours - it sounds like a tech directors wet dream, but again, CP kicked in and I've been hunting for information since I got back.
So, has anyone been playing around with this tech? (this crowd are not ipv6 ready, or intending to be for a while, fyi) and more importantly, does anyone know anything about exponential-e? Answers on a postcard please....

2 comments:

  1. TAHT SI NOFFING!!!!!1 TEH INTEHWEB GOWS THROO MY BASEMNET AN I HAEV HAX0R3D IT AND OMFGZ I SOW 0WNDED TEH VALVEH SOFTWAREZ WIT MEH 3ELEET SKILLZ!!! THE F4GOTS CAL MEH A LIES SO I HAX)RED TEH SORCE OF HAF LIFE TOO ADN RELEESE ON TEH WEB!!!!!1 ON MEH 1000MB HAX0R PIPEH!!!! I 0WN J00 F4GOT!!!!!!!

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  2. cool! Sounds like it may be along the lines of soemthing I have been hunting about for work too! We have people working from home over our VPN a lot, people working in full time different countries all transfering large files quite a lot. We would love the ability to host our betas and demos ourselves, although we dont have the bandwidth ourselves - etc etc. The scale of things your looking at maybe out of our price range, but I'm telling them the best technical options, I dont worry about cost :)
    I have asked a few people in work to sniff around about this company chris - I will let you know if I hear anything.

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