March 2010 Archives

Burundi - for those that do not know

With an estimated population of almost 8,700,000 and size of just under 28,000sq km, Burundi is one of the ten poorest countries in the world. It has the lowest per capita GDP of any nation in the world. Burundi has a low gross domestic product largely due to civil wars, corruption, poor access to education, and the effects of HIV/AIDS. - Wikipedia

And guess what? Continue Reading...

In a recent, Feb 12th 2010 interview with Sian Baldwin, BT Wholesale Director of Broadband and Content Services, she describes how local ISP's are struggling to cope with end-users demand for online video. As if the last-mile issues for those ISP's using cable and, or DSL were not enough, now access to the actual content on the other side of the network is the issue.

BT of course has been building a new FTTH network throughout the UK to address the last-mile piece and now they are creating their own CDN - Content Distribution Network - to be the single source for all video content for their own networks as well as all that is bound for the competitive last-mile ISP's.

From the interview and article in Global Telecoms Business:

"We are fast approaching what we call the 'grumpiness triangle'," says a BT spokesman. "ISPs are grumpy because the growth in video increases their backhaul costs and so they traffic shape. This makes end users grumpy because they don't want to wait to watch their favourite television programme.

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A 6.4 magnitude earthquake hit Taiwan Thursday morning and caused some serious damage - to the subsea systems in the area.

The earth is certainly doing what it wants as it always does. We cannot stop it, but we do need to prepare for it as much as possible. Fortunately, the traffic on the systems that were impacted has been re-routed over diverse cables.

From the Telegeography report the impacted systems were:

SMW-3 (Southeast Asia - Middle East - Western Europe 3) between Taiwan and China's Guangdong Province

APCN2 (Asia Pacific Cable Network, Number 2) also between Taiwan and Guangdong

CUCN (China, U.S. Cable Network) linking Taiwan and China

APCN (Asia Pacific Cable Network) from Taiwan to Singapore

FLAG (Fiber Optic Link Around The Globe) North Asia Loop (FNAL) between Taiwan and Hong Kong

The December 2006 Luzon earthquake was a wake-up call
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