Internet Report 21
Internet Newsletter No. 21
10 August 2002
More bandwidth
At the start of August 2002 we have increased the capacity of the Internet from 2.5
Mbit/s to 4 Mbit/s. The result has been improved performance especially over the peak periods, and for the first time in years the Internet links should never be saturated. This is a part of the on-going improvements that we are able to make to our service.
New computers
We have also ordered two rack-mounted dual processor Dell servers with dual fast SCSI drives. These will be used to replace some of the older computers that have run for 24 hours/day for several years. These should be operational shortly after you read this article and will be used to improve performance and some new projects including running the $20,000 ISYS search engine that Odyssey Development Pty Ltd have donated to our Group. See the President’s column in the September PC Update for more details on this.
Co-location news
To further improve our service to you, we will be moving most of our Internet equipment to another location within a few months. Our Internet gear will be housed in a data centre that has 24 x 7 x 52 monitored facilities with all the safety and backup features that include dual electricity input from two different sub-stations, a massive battery backup, diesel generators for longer outages, air-conditioning that can operate without external water, spectrographs to constantly analyse the air for smoke detection, telemetry, etc. Data protection is provided with duplicate external fibre cabling, and everything is powered from duplicate UPS etc. etc.
This means that response will be better as we will be connected directly on a huge backbone, and the probability of outages will be greatly reduced.
As well as all this we will be ordering more phone lines which should mean that you will almost never encounter busy signals. The co-location will also mean that we will be able to provide connection at a local call cost members in the Mornington peninsula as well some other outlying parts of Melbourne and hence allow more of our members to use our service.
So what else does this mean to our members? As well as better response and no busy lines, in the future we may be able to extend our service to a wider area in the future and perhaps also to give additional on-line time.
We hope to be able to move all our equipment to the new site without any interruption to our service using redundant computers and other duplicated equipment. We will be able to give more details in a month or two when our detailed planning has progressed further.
At this point I cannot state who will be providing this service, but we have narrowed it down to two organisations and some more work is needed to arrive at the final decision.
What are the drawbacks?
Possibly the only difference all users will experience is the phone number for dialling into our new service will change and everyone will have to alter their dialler. A new version of the configuration kit will be made available and an explanatory article in PC Update should make this fairly painless.
It may also mean some changes to the limited browsing access for Associate subscribers, however this is still being investigated. Mail and News will not be effected.
Finally I would like to make a statement that the reason we are co-locating our equipment is to provide an even better service to our members. We are NOT handing our operation to another commercial organisation. We have been voted the best ISP in the country and we intend to maintain this standard.
Despite these improvements there is no plan to increase in the Internet fees in the foreseeable future.