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Chat => Tech Chat => Topic started by: Weaver on March 23, 2017, 12:48:00 AM

Title: Microsoft Research opens new division on West Coast of Skye
Post by: Weaver on March 23, 2017, 12:48:00 AM
Say that someone wanted to set up a large business site with several hundred Gbps of i/o. How do you do it? Do you phone BT up and give them a large cheque? Then what physically happens if the site is not in Docklands?
Title: Re: Microsoft Research opens new division on West Coast of Skye
Post by: burakkucat on March 23, 2017, 01:15:55 AM
As I see it:

(Step 1) M$ Research (Isle of Skye) contacts "BT", shows that it is a bona fides company (company registration no, company registered office, company officials, etc) and requests that it is allocated a "BT account manager".

(Step 2) M$ Research (Isle of Skye) contacts "Barry Tam", their "BT account manager", and requests a quotation for a data link (to ? / from ?) which has a bandwidth capable of shifting "several hundreds" Gbps.

(Step 3) "Barry Tam" fills in the paperwork and eventually a site survey is performed. The "BT back-room gnomes" dust off their abbaci and calculate the cost. The quotation (with various provisos) is prepared and dispatched to the M$ Research (Isle of Skye) registered office.

(Step 4) M$ Research (Isle of Skye) accepts or rejects the quotation.
Title: Re: Microsoft Research opens new division on West Coast of Skye
Post by: Weaver on March 23, 2017, 01:32:52 AM
What do Barry's bods do to physically deliver on their promise? The bandwidth is not there at the local exchange.

When SMO (smo.uhi.ac.uk) did not give BT the business for hooking them up with a (then) ATM network to the rest of the world from its location in the far South of the Island, then all the locals suffered for many years as there was no 'economic case' bringing decent comms to the ordinary folks. Indeed those local exchanges were not upgraded as they should have been in 2006 and lots of locals were stuck with fixed 0.5 Mbps pipes when everyone else had got ADSL Max.
Title: Re: Microsoft Research opens new division on West Coast of Skye
Post by: burakkucat on March 23, 2017, 04:01:22 PM
What do Barry's bods do to physically deliver on their promise? The bandwidth is not there at the local exchange.

The circuit is extended to wherever M$ Research (Isle of Skye) desires . . .

It does not have to be a telephone exchange building. It might be to a POP in Edinburgh, for example. If the circuit reaches Edinburgh then there would be the option to become part of the B4RN (https://b4rn.org.uk/) network.

If it is decided that M$ Research (Isle of Skye) does not wish to deal directly with the BT Group plc then another option would be to look at the provision of an Ethernet based service over (one or more) fibre optical link(s) by, say, Andrews & Arnold (https://aa.net.uk/ethernet.html).
Title: Re: Microsoft Research opens new division on West Coast of Skye
Post by: WWWombat on March 23, 2017, 05:55:57 PM
What do Barry's bods do to physically deliver on their promise? The bandwidth is not there at the local exchange.

Barry's bods will offer service between any endpoints, within range. The "local access" option is one that terminates in the local exchange. The other options allow 25km reach and 45km reach.

But, are you sure the bandwidth is not there now?

Barry's other bods did that work recently to put lots of sub-sea fibre across the Western Isles, and Skye got attached at Ardvasar (to Mallaig) and Dunvegan (to Carnan on South Uist). There's a WDM route running Fort William - Mallaig - (Skye) - Kyle - Portree - Benbecula - Harris - Stornaway - Ullapool - Inverness, with a shortcut running Kyle - Ullapool on the mainland.

Those routes are lit with 100Gbps - Neil McRae describes it (https://youtu.be/5ZU5tvBUwZM?t=626) as 10x10G, which I assume means 10 wavelengths of 10Gb each.

If M$ Research (Isle of Skye) needs more, then I imagine they'd stump for 40G upgrades to a few wavelengths....

Title: Re: Microsoft Research opens new division on West Coast of Skye
Post by: Weaver on March 23, 2017, 07:17:10 PM
So BT can upgrade the WDM hardware at the two ends of links then?
Title: Re: Microsoft Research opens new division on West Coast of Skye
Post by: burakkucat on March 23, 2017, 08:38:17 PM
If it is her fibre optical link, then yes.