Belnet/Belgium -- 1 rack of space, unlimited
bandwidth, they are ready
to go Monday, they can do full hands-on, etc., including replacing
borken hard drives and so on like that. They are excited to move
forward quickly. In this case, we must supply the hardware. We can
either buy hardware (with the German money?) or I can ask someone to buy
it for us (see Big Company X, below).
Amsterdam - a large NGO wants to do a big press
announcement when I'm
there in Holland at the end of this month. They are providing a set of
servers which have already been ordered. I do not know the exact
specifications, perhaps someone else can tell me?
If we are talking Europe, I think the key here is to consider where the
traffic comes from and who has good connectivity to that audience.
Belnet is an educational network; so it will be able to provide the best
connectivity to the Belgian educational users (approx 500,000 users); and
connectivity to other networks via BNIX which is generally used by networks
in the Benelux countries. Outside of this it is going to be slower. And I
would expect they would want a cap on their external connectivity - they are
using Cable & Wireless and Cogent amongst others.
The dutch NGO, I cannot comment on but again this seems very Benelux
centric; I think it is important to consider where the primary hotspots of
traffic are:
- UK
- Germany
- Sweden
- Nederlands
If you study each NAP across Europe; you will see that the largest in terms
of traffic is LINX (London). If you then look at the participants on that
NAP you will then see that its not UK centric but a number of US, UK,
German, Dutch and Scandinavian networks are connected there. If you equate
this back in terms of number of users then this one NAP alone gives you many
millions of users; and the majority of tier 1 networks across Europe.
Then looking at the German market; most of the traffic/users are on Deutsche
Telecom's network, they also have multiple interconnects with LINX. The
tier-1 German networks are also well connected internationally.
In Sweden you have a different situation; the majority of traffic (general
not Wikipedia specific) I have measured seems to remain within the region
(SE/NO/DK/FI). This also seems to be how Bredbandsbolaget (main broadband
provider) seems to have dimensioned their network. This could also be down
to language - the Swedish/Norwegian/Danish language is similar enough for
their neighbors content to be of interest to them as well.
Statistics
----------
Population Users
Germany 82726188 46312662
UK 59889407 35179141
Italy 58608565 28610000
France 60293927 24848009
Spain 43435136 14590180
Netherlands 16316019 10806328
Poland 38133891 10600000
Sweden 9043990 6656716
Belgium 10443012 5100000
Austria 8163782 4630000
Greece 11212468 3800000
Denmark 5411596 3720000
Portugal 10463170 3600000
Czech 10230271 3530000
Finland 5246920 3260000
Hungary 10083477 3050000
Ireland 4027303 2060000
Slovakia 5379455 1820000
Latvia 2306489 936000
Slovenia 1956916 800000
Lithuania 3430836 695000
Estonia 1344840 621000
Cyprus 950947 250000
Luxembourg 455581 170000
Malta 384594 120000
In terms of Penetration:
Population Users
Sweden 9043990 6656716
Denmark 5411596 3720000
Netherlands 16316019 10806328
Finland 5246920 3260000
UK 59889407 35179141
Austria 8163782 4630000
Germany 82726188 46312662
Ireland 4027303 2060000
Italy 58608565 28610000
Belgium 10443012 5100000
Estonia 1344840 621000
France 60293927 24848009
Slovenia 1956916 800000
Latvia 2306489 936000
Luxembourg 455581 170000
Czech 10230271 3530000
Portugal 10463170 3600000
Greece 11212468 3800000
Slovakia 5379455 1820000
Spain 43435136 14590180
Malta 384594 120000
Hungary 10083477 3050000
Poland 38133891 10600000
Cyprus 950947 250000
Lithuania 3430836 695000
Assuming that the demand of Wikipedia content is the similar in terms of
percentage of population (its not but I do not have any figures to comment
on that yet), I would strongly consider the following first:
UK: LINX and XchangePoint. This will give access to all the tier 1 networks
in Europe
http://green.linx.net/cgi-bin/peering_matrix2.cgi
Sweden: DGIX. This will give access to all the tier 1/2 networks in
Scandinavia.
http://www.netnod.se/connected.htm
If anyone has any details traffic analysis for Europe or would like to set
one up, please let me know.
//Eden