Mother always encouraged us to share.
The current high-level emphasis on shared services across publicly-funded institutions may lead to the belief that sharing as a cost-savings measure is a recent invention; however, this would be somewhat off the mark. Networking is a prime example: the research and higher education (R&E) community in British Columbia officially began sharing networks when BCNET was formed in 1988. Founding members UBC, SFU, UVic and TRIUMF created this non-profit society as a means of pooling resources to achieve what would otherwise have been difficult or impossible for any one institution to achieve on its own. The collective accomplishments of the past 25 years are truly spectacular. There are many examples, but in this article I will focus on shared Internet access.
What is the Internet?
Wikipedia refers to the Internet as:
“… a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to serve several billion users worldwide. It is a network of networks …”
Please remember the phrase “network of networks” – it is key. To help explain some of the concepts ahead, I would like to make a self-centred addendum to the above definition:
“Anything, anywhere that is connected somehow, but not directly, to our campus network”
Or in other words: everywhere that is not here. This may sound odd, but it will help explain what’s coming.
Getting There
Communicating over the Internet is really a matter of connecting from here to there. In the physical world, when moving from one place to another, there are short-cuts and pathways that may be superior to other routes. Using highways as an example: some are faster and straighter, have more lanes and fewer intersections than others; some are chronically congested during rush hour, others not. The ease with which you move (the client experience) is governed by these factors. A similar dynamic plays-out on the Internet.
Our campus is connected to the Internet in one place, but it is useful to think of this as being three connections, distinguished by who we can reach through each connection:
Popular Internet content providersPeering
(Microsoft, Google, Facebook, …)
| Who/where | Connection |
| Research & Education partners (B.C., Canada and global) |
ORAN/CANARIE/International R&E networks |
| Everyone/everywhere else | Commercial Internet |
Research & Education
The first connection mentioned above is what we often refer to as the ORAN or CANARIE. This is a very high capacity connection composed of multiple 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) links to campus. We use it to connect to other research and education institutions all over the world: as near as Camosun College and as far as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland. CANARIE (funded by Industry Canada) operates a large, shared network connecting R&E sites in Canada from coast-to-coast-to-coast, with interconnections to similar organizations internationally. Canada can take pride in the fact that sharing has been a key objective of this network since its inception – other nations have only recently realized its importance.
Peering
The second connection is what the good people down in the engine room (Network Engineers) refer to as peering. Peering is the product of agreements between different organizations to create shorter, more-direct paths between the organizations (like roads that connect Company A to Company B without using the public road system). Changes last year in the form of CANARIE’s new Content Delivery Service (CDS) gave us the ability to take advantage of one such shortcut. The upshot for people at UVic is that now all network traffic to Microsoft, Google (including YouTube), Facebook and others takes a high capacity, much more direct route. This has two profound effects:
- a greatly improved client experience
- cost savings
This service is shared – provided by CANARIE over high capacity network links, and made available to universities through regional organizations such as BCNET.
The Internet
The third and final connection is often referred to as the Commercial Internet, or other words: everywhere else. Unfortunately, it is not a very large connection (about 700 megabits per second), and prior to the introduction of peering (see above), the university was suffering from chronic congestion here. Peering has offloaded almost 40% of the demand, eliminating the need to significantly increase spending. Think of this link as a toll road that goes literally everywhere, but is narrow and expensive to drive on.
Commercial Internet connectivity is another shared service provided through BCNET. Universities in B.C. have pooled their demand, and this combined purchasing power allows us to buy Internet capacity at near-wholesale rates. About every 2 to 3 years, BCNET tests the marketplace and procures a new set of supply contracts. At each renewal over the past decade, the total expenditure has remained roughly constant, but the capacities we are able to purchase have doubled. The cost savings are reinvested in obtaining more capacity for campus clients. In this way, we are able to keep pace (for the most part) with increasing demand without increasing costs.
Sharing of Sharing
As you can see, there are tangible benefits in sharing with our sister institutions and partners. However, there is an even more profound example of sharing much closer to home. Everyone who uses the Internet from campus is sharing the connections discussed above, automatically and perhaps without even being aware of it. Consider an alternative (hypothetical only) solution to a shared Internet connection, where we purchase individual Internet connections from a service provider for each and every client on campus:
25,000 x $50/month = $1,250,000/month
Our total annual costs for Internet access are less than 10% of this figure. Again: this is a totally hypothetical scenario – we are unlikely to ever implement anything in this fashion, but it provides a useful comparison to the cost-effectiveness of a shared connection.
Share and Share-alike
Hopefully this article has helped highlight the benefits of shared services. Since what may be new to some is old-hat for others, I would look to network folks in our community to provide leadership on this topic: they’ve been at it for a while and have a lot of experience to draw from.
In retrospect: it seems like mom was really onto something.