Quicker Connections
March 2016
By David Zaslawsky
Imagine, if you will, that in the next 18 months or so all the state’s major metro areas will be directly connected at 100 gigabytes or higher.
Imagine that in the next six months or so all seven of the research universities in Alabama will be directly connected to Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base. That will enable an exchange of data and information as well as cyber research.
You can imagine those things because Montgomery is thrusting itself into the high-tech world of the 21st century thanks to two key components that were recently installed. Akamai Technologies has set up servers at the Retirement Systems of Alabama (RSA) Datacenter on Dexter Avenue to speed up content from such companies as Netflix, Facebook and Google.
The city, county and RSA collaborated on an Internet exchange, which enables Internet service providers such as Charter, WOW and others to connect at higher speeds. There are only about 80 Internet exchanges in the country and three in the Southeast: Atlanta, Miami and Jacksonville, Florida. There are no cities the size of Montgomery that have an Internet exchange unless it is adjacent to a major metropolitan area, according to Joe Greene, vice president of Military & Federal Affairs for the Montgomery Area Chamber of Commerce.
“The Internet exchange ties commercial businesses to DoD (Department of Defense) – both for cyber research and for the exchange of ideas and information for potential government contracts,” Greene said.
These developments create the environment for new jobs, including spin-offs from the research universities. The Internet exchange, which has the current infrastructure to go to 40 gigs, helps transform Montgomery into an attractive site for high-tech companies. Greene said that is enough capability for probably 95 percent of businesses.
“Think of it as being similar to Hartsfield International Airport,” Greene said. “It’s a transfer point for all flights coming into there. That’s what an Internet exchange is – a transfer point for Internet traffic. An international airport like Atlanta draws all kinds of businesses into that area just because the airport is located there. An Internet exchange will draw IT (information technology) businesses in.”
The Internet exchange “will provide acceleration of the Internet for every business and every person in Montgomery for all the Internet service providers that connect directly to the exchange,” Greene said. There are seven Internet service providers who have committed to connecting to the Internet exchange.
Akamai’s role is moving content and storing it locally to greatly reduce the time of downloads – eliminating those frustrating pauses while content is being retrieved. Some downloads could take just a few seconds instead of a minute, Greene said.
Let’s say that you want to download a Netflix movie that is being stored in Michigan. You compete with millions of other people for that content, which significantly slows the time to download the movie. Akamai moves that film to the local area and now viewers are “competing with only a handful of people and you’re downloading it almost instantaneously,” Greene said. This only impacts content retrieved from the Internet.
The future plans for the Internet exchange call for increasing the capability to 100 gig or more because there will be companies needing more than 40 gig, Greene said, referring to 3-D printing companies that “need to move a lot of high-content data.” Firms that manufacture or produce parts “will have huge data files that will require mass storage and also the capability of pushing large amounts of data across the system,” he said.
