Internet Connectivity
BETTER-THAN-OC3 CONNECTIVITY
Great support and great features will get you nowhere without a wide pipe. We used to
advertise an OC3; now we've gone one better.
NTT India's Network Operations Center in Baltimore, Maryland is "OnNet" with
Frontier GlobalCenter (FGC), which means that we have a direct fiber optic connection
between our Cisco 7200 router and theirs. Being OnNet with a Tier-1 provider means that we
don't link to a backbone, we are actually on a backbone. We have no phone circuit, and
don't use a Telecom link to get to the Internet; instead, we have an in-house connection
directly to FGC's ATM fiber node, located a few floors below our servers in the same
building. This fiber optic line can handle the bandwidth of a T3 or an OC3, and with FGC's
Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technology, it can handle several times the
bandwidth of an OC3. MULTIPLE
BACKBONES
We share the digital distribution architecture of FGC, which is comprised of more than 25
high-speed private peering connections to major Internet carriers such as MCI, Sprint,
UUNET, AT&T, AOL, Best, Erols, and others. FGC also has high-speed links to 8 public
exchanges including both MAE East and West and several NAPS. To use an analogy, the
private peering connections allow data to travel from New Delhi to Mumbai on a non-stop
flight, while the public exchanges enable data to fly into the nearby city of Pune.
Sometimes the Net is slow...
What happens when your pipe is hooked up to a faucet that just trickles? Sometimes even
though your ISP and your web host are both functioning properly, you may still have a slow
data transfer rate. The Internet sends information all over the country and the world,
through a dozen or more computers on its way to you -- and somethings always getting
serviced somewhere in that long chain.
Heres what weve done
to speed things up:
Route Optimization
We have a large investment in BGP (Border Gate Protocol) technology which allows the
traffic to your site to travel more efficiently by finding the best route for data to
travel. On a typical server the traffic always takes the same route from client to server.
For them, if there is a bad node, traffic does not get through at all. Because we use BGP
protocol, different and more efficient routes are taken between client and server
depending on traffic loads and broken nodes. This means our servers automatically look for
the fastest route available.
Low Latency/High Throughput
Often providers operate their networks at three to four times responsible capacity, and as
a result the corresponding transfer times reach over 300ms for each hop along the net.
NTT India's network daily average is 6.5% of its capacity, with mid-day peak spikes
reaching only 15.5% capacity. Our transfer times range from 15 to 80ms routinely.