PacketExchange's Private Internet

Need uncontested bandwidth? This company has it all connected.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [March 29, 2007]

When London, England-based PacketExchange sent ISP-Planet a press release saying that a social networking site called Bebo had chosen the company to help it prevent slow web page downloads "experienced in certain areas" it was clear that PacketExchange would be interesting to ISP-Planet readers, and that Bebo would not be of any interest at all.

We reach CEO Kieron O'Brien at a conference, an hour before his speech, and he says he feels particularly well-prepared because he's been preparing a capsule description of the company already. "We started it back in 2001," he says. "The remit we gave to ourselves is to ensure that people who have a revenue-generating application can depend on a network to deliver that application."

The internet remains primitive. "The network was not capable of keeping up with certain types of application. Mail, search, and chat are tools, not revenue models, but were being used as part of businesses that generate revenue. In 2001, we saw CDNs storing frequently used content, but CDNs start failing if there's interactivity or highly dynamic content, such as files with short life spans, broadcasts, MMO games, and certain Web 2.0 applications with edge-generated content or upload-based transactions."

The bottom line to ISPs, he says, is simple. "If a 14 year old cannot upload fast enough, they'll [leave your network]."

The network
PacketExchange uses Ethernet-based MPLS over international fiber strands, which are leased, running between major internet exchange points. "We built our own mesh on top of fiber plays," explains O'Brien. "We buy our own wavelengths from multiple fiber providers. The network the applications run on is not owned by thousands of ISPs; it's owned by one company. We are completely in control; when there's an issue, we can fix it. For Bebo, we connect straight into their server farm and connect directly to 80 percent of the broadband ISPs."

CDNs still have a role, he says. "Some traffic shouldn't be on the internet because the internet's not built for it. If you've got an anti-virus update, a CDN will be great for that."

All of this sounds expensive to us, but O'Brien demurs. "If we don't make our customers successful, they won't be able to pay for our services, which would be expensive. If we had to recreate a fiber footprint that would be expensive. We started right in the teeth of the telecom collapse, and so got good deals then. Now that we have buying power, we continue to get good deals. We proved we can build; now we're proving we can scale."

A three tier internet
O'Brien warns ISPs not to try to solve problems just by adding bandwidth. He says latency is more of a problem than capacity. PacketExchange claims 20 ms latency within Europe and within North America and 50 ms between continents.

He claims that Europe is now performing 25 percent quicker than America, that a site hosted in Europe can now load faster than one hosted in the U.S. We mention that we've heard that bandwidth is particularly cheap in Holland, and he says that in any market, the quality reflects the cost. "However, if you're an ISP in the midwest and you find that Dutch content is popular, you don't have to build out your own network. We can join you to the Amsterdam Internet Exchange."

In summary, O'Brien warns of a three tier internet, with private networks like PacketExchange delivering the best quality, followed by peer to peer internet exchange, and lagged mightily by the public internet. "We're really changing internet geography," he says.

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