Getting faster access to the web

Some have been complaining over numerous channels that at times, YouTube and some other sites load up slowly between 2200hrs and 0100hrs , which we gone into some digging and found out that one of the CDN or Content Delivery Network servers were clogged up within the Singapore Data Networks. These includes of Google and their network servers (YouTube, Gmail, Apps, Android), Microsoft (using Akamai Technologies as their provider) and many more. Others include Facebook, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and basically, a whole lot of content providers.

It is basically a global cluster of distributed caches of data networks placed within cities or countries and the pool is mirrored across. ISP are told to route any queries to the nearest local cache to reduce bandwidth and they on the other end, have nearly terabytes of bandwidth to burst. However, at times, these servers are overloaded, and need to pull out fresh data out of trend from the public domain. This is when the bottle neck comes in.

If everyone understand, usually, a server holds nearly 10TB of Data and this is used for commonly called files, something like our web cache. A city farm holds about 4,000TB of data compared to exabytes of data stored across the globe, with some stored in mainland US or Mainland Europe.

We have to be wise in our usage of data. And bandwidth cost tons of money, about $10,000 per GB per month , actually on a Tier-2 IP-Transit. We know as we have our data farms and ISP usually requires 5 or more peering partners, so multiply that, and you work to over $500,000 a month in data charges at the very least.

So how can U get faster access?

Did you know of IPv6 ? Well, our computers and browsers are told to use IPv6 where possible and if you use up a tunnel through a broker such as Hurricane Electric, you are using their main stay link as the primary connection and since the server locally is jammed up, you simply take the back road and bypass the blockage and take up data from another cluster, say in the US or Europe side. These Transit Carriers have over 100TB of data links to mainland US and UK so us taking a little bit of data... is raindrops in the ocean.

If you are using Static IP and using ASUS N56 or N66 router, that is simple enough to set up. You can configure up the IPv6 Settings here and work it out from there. Results do show that you do get unlimited bandwidth to the US and it loads faster due to less number of hops.

What about Toggle and our mainstream Singapore Channels? Well, we can't do much as Singapore Government is not pushing them hard enough and with horrible data center connections. If it loads too slowly, go complain to IDA and make let the prime minister know about it.

For China, I am hoping someone can test out on 6Fei and let me know...

Thank ya all...
I'm back to my Netflix....