South Pacific Web Mapping

With the plan of introducing a new South Pacific fibre (see: http://www.pacificfibre.net)

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.

I have worked on this one lately:

click here for Australian / New Zealand Versions.

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”.

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)

I have stated looking into deploying Win2008 which made me do a bit of research on Ipv6 tunneling and coexisting it with IPv4.

Voice over IP can survive low bandwidth but has hard time with network latency (a human syllable averages 200ms-300ms) so choosing the best possible IP implementation will effect the transmitted voice quality), this makes AU/NZ VOIP a real interesting challenge.

These seem to be the main network/transport level solution I came across:

ISATAP: uses Dual-stack nodes to automatically tunnel IPv6 packets in IPv4, i.e., ISATAP views the IPv4 network as a link layer for Ipv6.

Teredo: creates IPv6 connectivity by tunneling packets over UDP, Teredo service runs by sing “Teredo servers” and “Teredo relays”.  Teredo relays act as IPv6 routers between the Teredo service and the native” IPv6 Internet.

6to4: treats the NAT box as a point to point link layer router into the native Ipv4 network and abstracts the global routing by using the NAT gateway as its Ipv6 termination point.

Tunnel Brokers: uses dedicated servers, called Brokers, to automatically manage tunnel requests coming from the Ipv6 client. Maps isolated IPv6 clients to agree on the routing tables used, allows the client to connect and activate IPv6 connections to other IPv6 by creating a virtual network between the Ipv6/IPv6 dual stack nodes. Dual stack users are nodes that can implement both protocols and uses the v4 implementation for the encapsulation mechanism.

From knowing how Cisco and Junipers are working together my guess will be that dual stack application level proxies (HTTP, SIP) that allows serving clients on both protocols will be the most common implementation in the short term (i.e. ISPs will be able to negotiate optional delivery methods over the available link and allow all types of client to receive the relevant service according to the clients protocol capabilities(blue coat seems to have a lot of research going in this direction)

This also make sense in terms of fighting latency as well since it allows efficient traffic over IPv6 on high bandwidth links (ISP to ISP) and last mile content proxy mechnism for optional clients (Win XP can do IPv6 from SP1).. VOIP will do the same with SIP termination points as the application proxy.

During the last four years I have been using JavaScript frameworks across many of the sites I have been developing, I found the Mootools syntax and object oriented approach to be the most intuitive to code with and JQuery to be the easiest to integrate with additional existing JavaScript libraries (with its excellent NoConflict mode).

When it comes to creating front-end functionality for integrating with ASP.NET, JQuery is definitively the framework of choice with its full Visual Studio integration and recent Microsoft’s support.

One of the main drives for utilising JQuery will be latency optimisation, where the entire load for functionality and client side validation could be offloaded for CDN delivery, reducing network delivery overhead.

This approach could be demonstrated with a recent implementation I have been involved with (see below) :

view the site

where a heavily requested travel sites is optimised for a quick initial load time with extensive client side validation, reducing server load and minimizing network communication (and its potential latency overhead).