The Internet Shock Absorber (ISA) Service distributes customers' static web content to caching servers located at Points of Presence (POPS) on Cable & Wireless USA's high-speed Internet Protocol backbone. It provides incremental web site capacity and reduces the impact of high demand for web pages. Site visitors accessing customers cached content will be served pages locally from the cache, reducing the number of connections and bandwidth requirements required by the customer's main web server. All ISA transactions are completely transparent to the site visitor browser requests, and appear to the site visitor as though they are connected to the customer's main server. 

Cable & Wireless can offer ISA to customers on competing services and networks. A customer is not required to host or connect to Cable & Wireless in order to purchase ISA. The targeted market for ISA are large content providers who are under pressure to scale their web server infrastructure to meet increasing demand for media rich content or serve an increasing number of site visitors. The secondary market consists of corporations that are looking for improved performance and reserve capacity in their web sites. 

Johnson asked the audience if they were familiar with Cable & Wireless; only two answered positively. C&W provides business-to-business communication and does not deal with individual home users (outside the United States they do). In the past their main activities were in voice communication but they have now purchased MCI's Internet backbone for $2 billion and are expanding it. Cable & Wireless is a British company that followed the Empire to communicate with all of its colonies and former colonies and now has a presence in 170 countries. A predecessor company laid the first Atlantic cable in 1856. They are buying ISPs in most of these nations and own backbone that carries 35% of the world's Internet traffic. 

Internet traffic is doubling every 90 days, and users suffer through unreliable connections and slow downloading. By the year 2000 over 170 million people will log on to the Internet. Things are only going to get worse as demand increases and the desire for media-rich content increases. Internet backbone companies form "peer agreements" with each other to "tunnel" requests from one company to another so that optimum routing can be achieved. Cable & Wireless is rapidly increasing its capacity to keep ahead of the increasing need for its backbone services. Optical carriers (OCs) provide the highest amount of band-width. Current traffic is over 280 terabytes per week with OCs providing a maximum capacity of 550 terabytes per week for peak conditions. The initial Internet backbone used Cisco routers and now a new company named Juniper is providing even higher speed routers. 

Cable & Wireless is installing 15,000 route miles of "dark fiber" (optical cable that is not yet used to deliver any traffic) to meet future needs. They expect to have traffic of 2,000 terabytes per week by the end of the year 2000 and will scale their equipment up to handle 5,000 terabytes per week. C&W is cable within the United States. The Wireless part of their name applies in other countries where they provide satellite and other wireless services. Their goal is to provide worldwide Internet connections. Mr. Johnson showed a node map of the MCI network and the added Cable & Wireless connections that provide very complete coverage over the continental United States. C&W provides a "green" status indicator when they deliver 99.9% of information packets and a "yellow" indicator above 97%. They claim to have not needed a "red" indicator for delivery below 97%. He said they are the only backbone company that makes its current performance data available to everyone on the Internet. 

Large users such as Yahoo and the Weather Channel need very high bandwidths. The Weather Channel has a high normal requirement that increases greatly during periods of bad weather such as the recent hurricane Floyd. Distant users can be faced with slow downloading and increased network latency during these heavy usage times. Providing additional bandwidth is expensive and doesn't solve latency problems. The solution is to make maximum use of existing bandwidth and to reduce the number of required connections to the originating server. Cable & Wireless implements a solution they call "Internet Shock Absorber" (ISA) that uses distribution based on caching servers nearer their customers. They can handle the load by maintaining the static data (much of the information content) at the local server and updating these servers as information is changed on the originating site. The process is transparent to the user. If a cache site fails, the Cable & Wireless network will provide a new routing and continue to provide service. 

This was the second meeting of the Chapter year and was attended by about 16 persons. The Cable & Wireless three-person team provided a very interesting and informative presentation. For more information go to their website at www.cwusa.com.

Mike Walsh, LA ACM Secretary