Adding 200 mbit/s from Galway to Dublin

It looks like the next couple of months will be very exciting.

We've recently peaked 86 mbit/s on our BT circuit to TeleCity in Dublin and the Smart circuit on the other end of town is running at around 23 mbit/s. That's an aggregated traffic volume of approx. 110 mbit/s at peak.

Now, we're going to shut the Dangan circuit down, maybe keep it as backup as it doesn't cost us much, but all the traffic on that circuit is going to be moved into our datacenter in Mervue. Also with only 14 mbit/s leeway left, more bandwidth was needed.

Smart is going to supply us with 100 mbit/s L2 (in addition to the BT circuit), which we're going to combine on the Cisco switches I've just bought for our network.

On top of that, we're going to get another 100 mbit/s L2 circuit into DEG in Dublin (another datacenter), where we are moving our INEX Lan#1 connection. That way, we'll be connected to INEX in two different datacenters and will be getting the optimum redundancy out of that.

That's a total of 400 mbit/s from Galway to Dublin now, where 300 mbit/s of that are in our datacenter in Mervue.

There were a lot of reasons for not increasing the circuit with BT:
- we wanted fiber into the building on a physical different path. Smart was not even allowed to bring the fiber in through the same ducting or elevator shaft. So matter of fact, we're bringing the fiber in through a cable-riser in the neighboring building and then through a complete different wall.
- we wanted the fiber on an entirely different path from Galway to Dublin. BT's fiber is along the irish railroads, while Smart uses ESB networks fiber along the pylons and high voltage lines.
- BT only installed a STM1 capable CPE, when they supplied us with the fiber initially. If we had opted just to increase that circuit, the CPE gear would have to be replaced resulting in downtime or us hauling the traffic across town to Dangan, which isn't really an option. The reason for establishing the DC in Mervue was, that we couldn't get decent wireless links to Dangan.

These are just a few of the reasons, why.