We were at The Marker Hotel in Dublin today for an INEX Meeting. INEX is Ireland’s neutral, industry-owned internet exchange, which provides IP peering facilities between its members. Our managing director Andrew Maybin is currently in his eighth year serving on the INEX board.
Its an invaluable organisation for Tibus and other IT businesses in Ireland, both in terms of the practicalities of improving performance for our customers through peering and by sharing ideas and examples of best practice with each other.
Today’s event was about the latter, with some excellent speakers drafted in to offer their own insights.
Andrew and the other board members arranged to fly Nicole Starosielski, assistant professor of media, culture, and communication at NYU, over to speak at the event (thanks to our key suppliers Telecity Ireland for sponsoring her travel costs).
Nicole gave a brilliant talk on The Undersea Network, the infrastructure of transoceanic fibre-optic cables that are essential in carrying the bulk of our digital communications around the world.
Among the many snippets we learned is that Guam, the US island territory in the Western Pacific, has more Internet cable landing points and interconnects than California and Florida! Fascinating stuff.
It is all really interesting and relevant to us given the cables coming into Cork and Mayo. They complement the existing transatlantic cable coming into Portrush, which is already being utilised by some of our clients.
If all this stuff fascinates you as much as it does us, it is well worth checking out Nicole and her colleagues’ beautiful digital presence at surfacing.in.
There was an excellent talk by Akamai’s Martin Hannigan. Akamai are essentially the world’s biggest non-network (they operate islands of hosting which are not connected to each other physically). That massive non-network comprises 200,000 servers in more than 1,000 cities around the globe.
They supply the content delivery networks (CDN) for huge chunk’s of the world’s online video, TV and radio.
Akamai are proper Internet citizens. Martin was very open and generous in sharing their best practices with us. He is also a vociferous fan of INEX and other IXPs, so it great to see him talking.
Really interesting and relevant given cables coming into Cork and Mayo [we can blog about significance of this at some stage] to complement the recent one into Portrush [which we’re involved in reselling into solutions for some clients]. Beautiful digital presence at www.surfacing.in
James Gannon is driving the formation of our very own Internet Society chapter in Ireland. Here at Tibus, we’ll be delighted to become founding members of this when it launches on Tuesday night.
The website will be live then and we’ll mention it again via our social media accounts at that stage so you can have a look.
We think it’s important to contribute to this new group because the internet has been good for Tibus (where it obviously provides our livelihood) and good for us as humans and private citizens.
We’ll support the new ISoc Ireland group in every way we can.
