When we started looking at how to increase our feed to the Internet backbone we looked at all types of connections. The one that many in our position seem to have selected was BC Tel's Ubiquity, a non tariffed offering based on fibre-optic and ethernet technology. The inter office transport seems to be mostly ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode), and the delivery vehicle to the end user is as a standard Ethernet connection.
If you look at the numbers, on the surface this technology looks like a winner. The Ethernet runs at 10 Mbs and a lowly T1 is only 1.45 Mbs so it looks like the Ethernet should be at least 6 times faster. But if you dig a bit, you recognize that Ethernet is uni-directional and T1 is bi-directional - so maybe the ratio should really be only 3 to 1. Well, if you look even further, you see that Ethernet also has collisions and unless put on a fairly expensive Ethernet switch connection to the local premise wiring, it has to also contend with all the traffic on the local network too. When you are sending things between machines, you can't send it out the net too.
What this means is that the T1 actually can and in most instances will perform at least as well as Ubiquity, and in many cases better. This has been born out by measurements we have made from sites on the US backbone looking back towards the various ISPs in the Vancouver area. One of the interesting statistics that have shown up almost unfailingly on the Ubiquity connections is a packet loss of 5% or more.
Another thing that we looked at was the support practices of the various long distance IP vendors. The connection we had to BC Net was typical of the level of support that many Internet connections had come to expect in the agency funded educational/research times leading up to the early 1990s - largely office hour support with outages that could be measured in tens of hours at times. Because we were starting to cater more and more to business customers, we felt that a much higher level of support was necessary, and looked hard for it.
We selected fONOROLA I* Internet for many reasons and we have not been disappointed. The connection went up on time, and has been rock solid ever since. In the one instance that we have called them, at about 11:30PM one night, we got a live network person, and when the nature of the problem was explained we got a prompt call back from their network specialist. All this from their Ottawa network centre and at 2:30AM their time. This is the type of support that we were looking for.
The one major difference we have seen since the T1 went into service is the number of WWW pages we have delivered. In January we delivered just over 1.5 million files. In February the number climbed to 3.5 million, but the network response deteriorated to ping times measured in seconds instead of the milliseconds that it had been.
In March, we delivered in excess of 9 million files! During the whole month, the ping times to the T3 in Seattle stayed well below 50 milliseconds, so our local users were also getting excellent response when out surfing to other places. This has continued into April, and we look like we will do another record month. We have been quipping to people that we have the second largest WWW site in Canada - sitting right beside the largest WWW site in Canada! Our two main WWW machines are each delivering more files than any other Canadian machines we can discover.
At this level, our systems should be able to cope with a load at least 10 times greater than they currently have - which at the current growth rate ought to last us at least a couple of months or so. It's sure a good thing that we got them to run in the facilities for 3 more T1 connections while they were at it.
richard
admin@wimsey.com