December 1999
By Chuck Gehman
The Internet has become a much more prominent player in digital workflows for the graphic communications industry and the Internet will continue to take a front seat as we move into the millennium. Is your company prepared to embrace this technology and have you carefully considered all the components before incorporating this technology seamlessly into your workflow?
There are a number of components to examine before driving full speed ahead with the Internet. The most critical component or the component that could make or break corporate Internet strategies is selecting an appropriate ISP. An appropriate ISP for graphic communications companies can be defined as a network service provider that offers the performance, speed and support required for today’s digital workflows.
The Internet in graphic communications workflows has a different set of needs than the Internet used in the home or for general business applications. The graphic communications industry requires networks that provide high speed and reliability, if it is going to support large file transfers, multi-site collaborations and special applications like on-line job submission and tracking. It is possible to obtain the kind of quality of service benchmarks graphic communications professionals need. If you understand what you are purchasing and chose an ISP with an appropriate level of expertise and dedication to the graphic communications industry, you’ll be able to embrace the Internet and drive full speed ahead.
There are a considerable number of acronyms in this white paper, in the trade press and, frankly, on the Internet in general. We’ve tried to define all the acronyms used in this paper as they are used, but for further clarification, check out DAX’s on-line connectivity glossary of terms at www.dax-it.com.
Who’s driving the Internet?
By now, most people understand that the Internet is a “Network of Networks” that appears to operate as one, large seamless network. No one owns the Internet, no one controls it or manages it, and yet somehow it works. While we say that the Internet is not owned by anyone, it is actually owned by many. Large telephone companies and ISPs, Universities and Government Agencies (both in the US and abroad) and private companies have all contributed signifcantly to the development of the Internet as we know it today, and each own or manage large pieces of it.
Today, a collection of organizations control the relevant technologies of the Internet. These are the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), the Internic (Operated by Network Solutions, Inc. under a US federal government mandate.) Soon, the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) will have significant control of the registration of Domain Names (i.e., www.yourcompany.com) on an international basis. While none of these organizations have complete control over the Internet, each of these organizations exert their authority over the Internet by having their membership made up of the people who are involved in creating, maintaining and using the Internet. For instance, the head of the IETF is Fred Baker from Cisco Systems (they are the largest provider of equipment used to transport Internet traffic.) Other members come from industry, academia and the federal government.
The entire focus of this paper could be spent talking about these organizations, what they do and how they influence the development of Internet standards to keep this network of networks operating. The purpose of this discussion is the state of the Internet today and we have now provided enough background information to assist you in the ISP selection process. Your selection of an ISP is especially critical when you are planning to incorporate the Internet into your production workflow.
The Backbones
In the human body, the backbone is your spine, carrying the impulses that allow your central nervous system to function.The Internet backbone today provides this same “central nervous system function”, but there isn’t just one backbone (a few years ago, there was only one, owned by the government.) Today, the Internet is made up of an interwoven fabric of large, ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) backbone networks that are owned by telephone companies and large ISPs, connected together through public and private “peering points.” Types of peering and peering points will be addressed later.
A company that owns a national or international backbone is called a “Tier 1” Internet Service Provider (ISP.) This is the top of the line ISP. A Tier 1 provider has made huge investments in infrastructure- from Fiber Optic Cable to ATM Switches and giant Routers. Tier 1 ISPs are committed to the Internet business for the long haul and have invested billions of dollars to ensure it’s success. These companies include: AT&T, MCI/Worldcom, GTE Internet, Digex, PSINet, Qwest, and several other companies. Note that some of these companies are both ISPs and telephone companies. Interestingly, some of the most well known Internet companies are NOT Tier 1 ISPs.
AOL (America Online), for example, is not a Tier 1 ISP. They are actually, by definition, a Tier 2 provider. AOL does not own it’s own network- although one wouldn’t be aware of that fact as a user of AOL, and in fact, at one time they did own a backbone. AOL now buys their network capacity from Tier 1 providers, like MCI/Worldcom and GTE Internetworking. Other well-known examples of Tier 2 ISPs are Earthlink (it’s networks are provided by PSINet and Sprint) and Mindspring (again, buying their network from PSINet. The definition of a Tier 2 is that they have made a significant investment in infrastructure and marketing, as the above examples demonstrate very well, but Tier 2 providers do not own their own national or international backbone networks.
Next are the Tier 3 ISPs. Tier 3 ISPs typically operate on a regional or local basis. They may purchase their capacity from a Tier 1, but they don’t buy in the bulk quantities that the Tier 2s do, so they typically don’t get the same level of service that the bigger players do. They may also get their service from other small providers (like another Tier 3.) This is the nature of the complex web of relationships that make up the Internet today.
Finally, there are companies further down the food chain than the Tier 3s, and they would be considered Tier 4 or 5 ISPs. I will not name any of these companies, but their networks are characterized by extremely poor performance and less than mediocre customer service. Their poor performance is caused by the fact that they are several networks away from any of the large Internet backbones, causing any traffic to or from their customers to go through a variety of equipment and congestion points.
Now that we’ve defined the playing field and the players, let’s compare the services offered by these various companies. You will begin to see that there is a wide range of service offerings provided by these various organizations, and they can be hard to distinguish without asking the right questions.
Peering
The quality level of the Tier 1 providers tends to be superior. In fact, if your site is directly connected to a Tier 1 ISP’s, you will get above average Internet performance. When we say above average performance, we’re talking about achieving stated throughput objectives across the network (there aren’t long delays in sending or receiving files or accessing web sites), network availability (i.e., your circuit doesn’t unexpectedly go down or performance routinely slow down to a crawl), and technical support.
Typically, if the site you are connecting to is ALSO on a Tier 1 network, AND the two backbone networks are connected together in a robust way you will experience maximum Internet productivity. The point in the Internet where two Internet backbone networks come together is called “peering”, and the way this is done can have a huge impact on the performance you achieve over the Internet. There are two types of peering- public and private.
Public peering occurs at places known as MAEs (Metropolitan Area Exchange) or NAPs (Network Access Point). These are facilities that have been setup by a carrier or a group of carriers that provide the infrastructure where the various backbone networks connect. For example, MCI/Worldcom owns one of the biggest, most heavily trafficked public peering facilities - it’s called MAE EAST. MAE stands for “Metropolitan Area Exchange.” MAE EAST is basically a big room in Reston, Virginia where there is an enormous quantity of networking equipment sitting in racks and even more fiber optic telecom cables bringing in Internet networks from all over the country. To have a connection at one or more of the public peering points is essential for a large ISP. There are two other MAEs – one in California (MAE WEST) and one in Texas (MAE CENTRAL.) While ISPs need to be connected through the MAEs and other public peering points, these connection points tend to be heavily trafficked and can be congested at times—leading ISPs who want to provide better performance arrange “private peering” with other providers.
Private Peering is when one or more ISPs arrange with one another to connect their networks together outside of the public peering points. Here’s an example: your company is based in Atlanta and Mindspring is your ISP. A customer across town uses GTE as her ISP. For the purposes of this discussion, let’s say that GTE and Mindspring don’t have a private peering relationship in Atlanta. What happens when you send a file to the customer? Your data has to travel to one of the public peering points (in this case, the closest one is probably MAE EAST in Virginia), and then go over GTE’s backbone to be delivered. If both ISPs had chosen to privately peer in Atlanta, your traffic would have gone directly across town. This means your connection did not have to go from Atlanta to Virginia and get stuck in a traffic jam at the MAE and then travel back to Atlanta.
The number of private peering arrangements and how they are setup can seriously affect the performance you will achieve when you attempt to do file transfers or any type of online activity using the Internet. The best Tier 1 ISPs are peered in a big way (large network connections using ATM switches), so the impact of the data going from one network to another is minimized. Others that aren’t peered may need to have your traffic travel over multiple backbone networks before it is delivered to it’s destination.
Keep in mind that the public peering points, although they are well designed and have been significantly upgraded recently can be choked with traffic at times. A great example of this is a major international event (like a Super Bowl, weather or political event- millions of people attempt to access web sites to get information about the event.) At times like this, power of private peering really comes into play. Private peering allows your file transfer or collaboration session to bypass the bottlenecks that are inherent in the public peering sites.
Access
Access is how your company is connected to the Internet. Usually when people tell you “I’ve got a T-1 to the Internet”, they are referring to the “access” portion of the connection.
There are two important components to access. First, is the part between you and the ISP’s POP (Point of Presence.) This part of the connection is done today using four major technologies: Analog Modems, ISDN, T1s and DSL. Second, and perhaps more importantly, is how that POP is connected to the Internet backbone.
A Tier 1 ISP will have many POPs all over the country. Typically, they’ll have at least the 50 major telecom markets, and most will have considerably more. Without doing a lot of research and scouring the web for data, you can pretty much assume that if you are dealing with a Tier 1 provider, and you live in a town whose name is immediately recognizable to people who don’t live there, you are going to have a POP within a reasonable distance from your facility. This is extremely important, because the lines that connect you to the ISP POP are “distance sensitive”, meaning that the further away you are, the more you will pay. This is true of both T1 service and ISDN. If you are too far away from the POP with DSL, you may not be able to obtain that service at all.
“Backhauling” is a term used to describe what can potentially happen when your office is in a less populated, more remote area. Since there isn’t a POP in your town, the ISP contracts with the telephone company in your area (who may then work with a variety of other telcos) to engineer a longer circuit to reach the POP. This is fine as long as it is done properly, but remember it adds cost and can present maintenance headaches down the road. The connection is more complicated than if the POP were local to you, and therefore can cause the telcos and ISP to have to do more work if there is ever a problem with the connection.
If you are using ISDN for access and your internet POP is in your town, the difference will mean that the call you make to the POP will be local vs. long distance. Local per minute rates for ISDN range from free to about $.02/channel minute. Long distance rates hover in the $.24/channel minute neighborhood. This is a big difference, so you’ll more than likely need to make sure you are making a local call to that POP.
The key concept here is that both the access and the backbone are important. Think of it this way, if you on a 4 lane on-ramp to a two lane highway, you’re not going to get where you’re going as fast as you might think.
The “Health Club Model”
With few exceptions, ISPs today are considerably oversubscribed. This means that they sell more actual bandwidth than they own on their network. This problem is worse with the Tier 3 and lower providers than it is for the Tier 2 and above, as the larger companies have built out more capacity than they will need for a short time, with built-in scalability to expand the network as their installed base grows.
This oversubscription is referred to as the “Health Club Model.” The concept is simple: a healthclub has room for 150 people; they sell memberships to 1000. When a majority of members show up to work out at the same time, no one will be happy. The owner of the gym is counting on the fact that not everyone will want to work out at the same time, and that a percentage of the customers will pay their memberships and never visit. This is a plan that has proven to work to various degrees of success in that business.
The same is true for Internet access, only it typically doesn’t work quite as well as the health club model (especially for the graphic arts industry customer who needs high bandwidth and premium service.) The Internet scenario is as follows: I’m a local ISP and I’ve got a full T-1 to a Tier 1 provider’s incredibly robust backbone. I’m service oriented, and I’ve got blazingly fast performance across my T-1 to the backbone. I also have 2,000 local dial-up modem customers, 20 128K ISDN corporate accounts and 4 T-1 customers who I’m providing service to using that connection. Most of the time, my ISDN corporate customers are going to get excellent service. Those 4 T-1 customers are almost always going to get great performance, that is, except when all the modems are dialed-up, the 20 corporates are fully utilizing their capacity and the other three T-1 customers are watching streaming videos at Broadcast.com. Its easy to understand why this wouldn’t be the optimal access for a company that planned on using it’s Internet connection for large files transfers.
With the advent of DSL, this problem is multiplied because DSL access provides the equivalent of a 6 lane highway as an on-ramp. This doesn’t do the user any good if the connection upstream to the backbone is oversubscribed.
Another key trend in access is for ISPs to use “packet shaping” devices to control what kind of traffic goes over their networks. These devices typically prioritize types of traffic so that the ISP can provide a perception to their clients of excellent performance. The key here is that most ISPs expect their customers to be primarily surfing the web and sending email. For most companies, this is true and actually makes the ISP customer happy in most circumstances. For a company in the graphic communications industry expecting high-performance, large file transfers, it can be a rude awakening to discover that file transfer (i.e., FTP) performance is being sacrificed to benefit the web surfer. Again, you’ve got to ask the right questions to get the service you need.
Going International
Canada is experiencing a build-out of bandwidth that is similar to that occurring in the US, albeit on a slightly smaller scale. All the major Tier 1 ISPs have a presence in Canada, and there are many regional and local ISPs offering DSL, Cable Modems and even a variety of different broadband wireless services. Again, the backbone and access issues are the key to choosing an ISP in Canada, as well as the connections that are provided to the US. Consider how much of your file transfers are going to be coming from the US, and how the ISP is connected to the large Internet backbones when making your decisions.
Bandwidth in Europe and Asia today is a scarce commodity. European ISPs are undergoing consolidation in the same way the US ISPs have over the last couple of years. This means that eventually they will have the same levels of service that are available in the US. At the present time, there are only a few companies that have truly robust, trans-atlantic Internet networks, and again, that could be very important for your file transfer applications, if you are receiving US files in Europe. Additionally, regulator issues vary in the European countries and access can be very expensive. DAX is currently working with multi-national companies delivering production files to Europe over the Internet, so we’ve investigated a lot of the challenges and opportunities you might face in attempting to obtain robust connectivity. For more information on connecting to Europe using the Internet, feel free to call me directly.
Asia represents a significant challenge, as well. While there are US ISPs who have trans-pacific links of significant size, the services in the actual countries vary greatly. For instance, in places like Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Maylasia, there are excellent providers. However, in mainland China, Vietnam and other countries, it is both difficult to get access and the regulator and government restrictions can delay or prevent any sort of access if you don’t work with the right partners. Again, for more information contact DAX directly.
Service and Support
One of the most important items you should have on your checklist for choosing an ISP is the level of service and support that your prospective ISP will provide to you. A 24 hours per day, 7 days per week help desk should be the baseline.
Especially important to a company in the graphic communications market is to work with an Internet Service Provider that knows both the industry and the Macintosh. We’ve found that the level of support for the Mac provided by most ISPs today is extremely limited. Most of DAX’s clients are using the Mac as their primary workstation, we know how to solve Mac connectivity issues and file transfer problems. Additionally, our customers want to use their existing servers and Digital Asset Management systems to receive files and interact with their customers online—this is going to require some knowledge both of the equipment and software, operating systems, network topologies and workflow.
How many ISPs do you know that can tell you the difference between a TIFF/IT workflow and a Postscript workflow? We think there is a significant value in working with a company that is involved in the applications you’ll be using over the Internet. If you work with a company that has more residential than commercial customers, their service apparatus is not going to be set-up to support mission critical applications for the graphic communications industry company. Even companies that are business oriented may not have the level of competence you will need to leverage this important tool for your business.
In Summary
The Internet has emerged as a viable transmission vehicle for large production file transfers. To make this happen for your company, ask the right questions and know what kind of service level to expect for the money you will spend. DAX has assembled a team of experts in these applications, and we stand ready to help you make this important decision for your company.
For further information or assistance in planning you company’s data and telecommunications strategy, please contact DAX at info@dax-it.com or by calling (800) 329-6266.
(c) 1999 Digital Art Exchange, Inc. All rights reserved.
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