the New Zealand Internet Industry will get a major boost in its potential growth.
The existing Southern Cross cable architecture introduces a significant latency factor due to the commercial decision to terminate all legs at Maui (Hawaii).
This doesn’t have a major effect on data speed and bandwidth (with powerful routers in Hawaii) although introduces major challenges for VoIP communication where the call quality is determined by latency (number of hops and carrier distance).
With a direct link from California to Auckland and a straight cross over the Tasman either to Sydney or Melbourne (see below):
(source: http://www.pacificfibre.net)
and the rapid growth in VoIP usage across the pacific, Australian VoIP providers and voice operators such as CRM and call centres will find NZ a very attractive environment, located close enough to Australia and right on one of the Pacific’s best communication hubs.
We are currently experimenting in SIP packets routing thorough Asia(Singapore) and US (Virginia) for optimizing global voice link to Europe. stats soon.
Thanks to Vladimir Verlinsky for the TCP/IP BGP4 routing leads.
and starting to really like SharePoint 2007 (SP2 onwards), excellent .NET application container that allows you to define your cache policies and expiry periods(BLOB, Output and Object Caching) and fine tune expiry periods.
a Nice feature is when you really need to go spatial (GIS queries and mapping UI) you can use native SQL Server as your data store and still have content and media resources caching managed by IIS/Load-balancer.
When dealing with Australian and New Zealand mash-ups I believe the best way is maintaining a data store with well defined expiry periods (e.g. traffic vs. weather vs. external providers cached content) and later distributing its static elements into the cloud.
I have been experimenting with Amazons EC2 services for a real estate related research project (heat mapping commercial property stats) and Amazon has excellent .NET hooks allowing you to push content out to the cloud and later reference it within .net applications (or any other content blocks), this methods significantly reduce bandwidth costs/server maintenance overhead and improves response and serving time by reducing latency.
The architecture illustrated below will provide a SharePoint managed CDN for $0.15 USD per GB of traffic (based on Amazon’s current data transfer price plan):
This page has been constructed out of content distributed from three different continents, so the bottom line is:
“use out of the box content management tools and distribute its product using cloud services”.
Last year while chopping some wood down the garage I found this old newspaper (the other side of this page was about Ronald Reagan campaign for the 1981 US elections, not sure how this one managed to stay there all these years…
my Coromandel mates told me this summer its up on the agenda again (see: Coromandel WatchDog).
We lived in the Coromandel for over two years and had great two weeks in this beautiful green bush on Xmas, will be back as every summer next year!!
a cool Coromandel itinerary I have recommended for several of my overseas mates could be seen here.
Late last year Google announced that the next major update to the Page Rank Algorithm (search result indexing) will start taking into account the pages load (response time) see below:
This is introduce a major challenge while developing and hosting NZ/AU based web application, which many believe could be addressed using the following delivery techniques:
1) Identify your main landing pages for your primary key terms and define the most frequently managed content (banners, specials, news etc.) and push the container HTML out to the cloud managing the content using iframes or content deployment technologies (such as SharePoint).
2) Using more frequently updated pages with heavier functionality as link juice back into those primary fast loading landings pages.
3) Its been confirmed that both Bing and Google will not penalize on repeating content within sub domains (e.g. nz.mysite.com and au.mysite.com) allowing regional content and location related functionality to exist closer to its potential audience while containing similar data and templates.
4) Following the Latency Recommendations for AU/NZ based web pages for minimising the response time only to the one introduced as a result of router hops and distance.
2010 will be a good year for optimising South Pacific content, ensuring high ranking on future mobile device based search results(these will have only five relevant winners on the first page ;o)
Had an interesting biz tour in Seoul last month, pretty amazing growth in terms of GDP and Internet usage, once there LG and Samsung seems to be just the tip of the iceberg when looking into the local devices, service providers and wireless data infrastructure.
web mapping capabilities and internet UI (animation and front-end stuff) still has lots of potential giving the fact that the local script (Hangul) is all left to right with a nice reasonable 24 character set.. and could run Joomla almost out of the box!!
I have done a few speed/load tests from downtown Seoul, lots of router hops on a really good link, latency to NZ/AU was pretty big though..
