I've written before about The Ephemeral Network.

Lately I've been thinking about what we do at UEN to make the network ephemeral. Remember that something with ephemeral qualities is short-lived. It's one of those crazy ironies of life. To make the network endure we need to be addressing short-term issues. Also, in Mike Vance's terminology, to be ephemeral is "to get more out of less."

When I started at UEN we were spending about $300,000 a year for a little more than one DS-3 worth of Internet bandwidth. That was in January 2000. By early 2001 we were completely saturating one OC-3 connection. Our costs for the OC-3 were close to $600,000 annually. That summer we added an additional OC-3 and our costs rose to nearly $1,000,000. Shortly after that the economic crisis hit. We have been unable to secure additional Internet funding for the past 2 years. We will not increase our internet funding for at least another 15 months. But our Internet usage continues to double every 18 months. So how do we cope?

We've done two things to deal with Internet bandwidth issues. One, we negotiated new pricing that just about cut our cost per OC-3 in half. But that's not the whole story. Pete and Barry began to identify Internet carriers who were willing to provide Internet peering connections.

They circulated a Request for Proposal (RFP) and chose TOUCHAMERICA to provide peering links. One OC-3 peering circuit was added last summer and this year we will add another. That will give us four OC-3 Internet connections.

So, what is ephemeral?

Doubling our capacity without increasing our budget.

Moving fast enough to keep up with demand.

That's ephemeral.......
10:39:04 AM    comment []