DS3 Story

A sophisticated application of proprietary TCP/IP routing technology not only can provide capacity on a scalable basis, but it can improve connectivity as well. One company had single T1 connections to Sprint, MCI, and Agis. They provided redundancy, as well as ability to police traffic and balance routing among the different backbone providers.

Three-T1 infrastructure allowed the company to route traffic to addresses within Sprint's backbone via Sprint, MCI addresses via MCI's backbone and Agis addresses via Agis. For addresses that did not reside on these three backbones, traffic was routed indirectly via the optimum default route for the company, MCI. This meant that all default traffic as well as MCI traffic was routed via MCI, often resulting in an overload of the MCI T1 and slower performance for the companies customers.

Furthermore, without a metered billing system, the company still paid for unused bandwidth on connections that were not at capacity. The company had several options to increase and better manage bandwidth. One was to buy an additional T1 to a fourth backbone provider. This option would add capacity but might do nothing to relieve congestion on the MCI connection. If Sprint became the congested route in six months, a second MCI T1 would do nothing. to relieve the Sprint congestion.

Another option was a single T3 to one provider. This would add capacity and eliminate the need for routing. It would also: however, eliminate redundancy: If that provider's system went down, so would the company.

They instead can use a DS3 to InterNAP Network Services, which provides direct connectivity and routing management with a metered billing plan comparable to the cost of several T1 connections. InterNAP's private network access point (P-NAP) provides high-bandwidth direct private peering between Seanet customers and the seven major backbones. However, a seventime multi-homed infrastructure alone offers no significant advantage over a single connection other than redundancy, unless traffic is routed to the backbone that owns the destination address.

InterNAP uses a proprietary, patent-pending technology that directs routers throughout the Internet to choose the fastest and most direct path to and from InterNAP. This technology -- Assimilator -- allows the P-NAP to determine which routes are connected to which backbones and to place all Seanet customer outbound traffic directly onto the destination backbone in one router hop. Likewise, inbound traffic destined for Seanet customers travels only over one backbone, the fastest and most direct path possible, to the P-NAP and to the customer. In effect, the P-NAP treats each backbone to which it connects as a private network and only sends and receives IP packets destined for addresses directly connected to that network.

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