Ok, this is severely nerdy/techie, but today Time Warner started installing the final few hundred feet of the conduit for our new OC-3 connection. (An OC-3 is a fairly large internet connection — about 155 megabits per second, roughly 100 times the speed of a T-1)
We’ve been running off of a T-3, with redundancy at an off-site facility. It’s taken months to lay the optics (including a delay to get by our nearby railroad tracks), but we’re almost there. Time Warner will probably end up installing an OC-12 for the building, of which we’ll get an OC-3 connection.
The connection is going into our second location here, the Clearwater Tower, which houses our technical staff.
The OC-3 is necessary for the kind of bandwidth we’ll be consuming with current growth, but also with SPECTRE, the web crawler we’re working on to find new spyware installs on the web.
We sometimes forget that internet connectivity relies on things like cutting apart pavements. So just for kicks I’ve posted pics and some videos below (thanks Dan):
(Click on pics to enlarge)
Videos (not optimized for low-bandwidth!): Video 1 Video 2 Video 3 Video 4 Video 5 Video 6
Alex Eckelberry