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BETTER
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.
 Our Network Operations Center in Baltimore, Maryland
is "OnNet" with Frontier Global Center (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 York to LA on a non-stop
flight, while the public exchanges enable data to fly
into the Roseburg, Oregon airport.
"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 something's always
getting serviced somewhere in that long chain.
Here's what we've 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. One World'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.
| Hardware
and System Specfications |
| CPU |
Ethernet
Connection |
Web
Server |
Operating
System |
| Pentium
Pro |
100
Base T |
Apache
Version 1.3 |
Linux
Redhat Version 5.0 (Hurricane),
Kernel 2.0.35 |
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