Sonic Transit

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Sonic Transit

• A Global Internet Routing and Topology Solution

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What is Sonic Transit?

• A fully meshed international network topology
  that provides customers with access to multiple
  Tier 1 Internet Service Providers anywhere in the
  world
• Allows customer to choose their ISP on-the-fly
• Allows for user selectable routing in near
  real-time
• End-to-end network backbone management services
• A cost effective network communications
  architecture that is focused on reliability, low
  latency, and high bandwidth

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Why Sonic Transit?

• Cost to Performance Ratios
• International data circuits can be cost
  prohibitive, but performance is high
• Example 1 A T1 (1.5 Mbps) circuit between New
  York City and Johannesburg, South Africa costs
  45,000 per month
• Example 2 A 56K circuit between Los Angeles and
  Jakarta, Indonesia costs 22,000 per month
• Example 3 A T3 (45 Mbps) circuit between
  Atlanta and New Delhi, India costs 198,000 per
  month
• Internet based VPN services are inexpensive, but
  the performance is extremely poor when
  communicating with international destinations

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Leased Circuit Pros and Cons

• Advantages
• Private
• Low packet loss
• Low latency
• Ideal for todays VOIP and streaming media
  technologies
• Disadvantages
• Cost prohibitive
• Redundancy can only be obtained by leasing two
  circuits which doubles the cost

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MPLS Pros and Cons

• Advantages
• Less expensive than leased data circuits
• High performance at lower cost
• Data security
• Disadvantages
• Competing with other traffic provides no Quality
  of Service (QoS)
• Committing to a QoS requires additional fees
  which increase costs greater than a leased data
  circuit
• Cost prohibitive for small organizations

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Internet VPN Pros and Cons

• Advantages
• Inexpensive
• Installation is as quick as you can configure
  your VPN device
• Works great when 24x7 access or high performance
  is not required
• Disadvantages
• Performance is as good as the Internet services
  between each destination
• Connectivity is typically plagued with packet
  loss and high latency
• Connectivity over long distances degrades
  performance
• Bandwidth is variable and subject to change
  frequently, and not at the subscribers option
• ISPs over subscribe their backbones to maximize
  their profit margins before maximizing customer
  performance

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Sonic Transit Benefits

• Low latency connectivity from NAP to NAP
• Customer becomes their own ISP, thus not having
  to rely upon IP address assignments that belong
  to the upstream ISP
• If you switch to a different ISP, your network
  does not change
• Solution is entirely managed to reduce customer
  overhead expenditures
• Co-location of network equipment is included with
  the service
• Customers still maintain total control of network
  assets
• Higher bandwidth at lower cost
• Scalable architecture that is adaptable to any
  network media
• Bandwidth becomes cost effective due to large
  capacity purchases by TWIX
• Small-footprint architecture which means that
  customers do not have to obtain additional
  equipment to use Sonic Transit

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A Sonic Transit NAP

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How Does Sonic Transit Work?

• Multiple Internet peering routers communicate
  using a proprietary Routing Signature Protocol
  (RSP) to all nodes in the mesh
• Every peering location has at least one RSP node
  that is capable of servicing all other locations
  in the mesh (currently we are at N33
  redundancy!)
• Each node is responsible for digitally signing
  the RSP data before sending to another node
• Since all nodes have unique signatures, RSP data
  are never duplicated
• RSP categorizes the state of Internet
  connectivity between carrier peers to all other
  RSP nodes in the mesh
• RSP injects routes into upstream and downstream
  routers in real-time to provide low latency
  communications

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Sonic Transit NAP to NAP Communications

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Benefits of RSP

• Packet size is no larger than 512 bytes
• Packets are not transmitted unless state
  information needs to be exchanged due a topology
  change
• Topology changes are based upon
• Information gathered from BGP
• Latency
• Packet Loss
• Bandwidth required to meet CIR
• Historical information
• Current events e.g. (virus, backbone failures,
  terrorist threats, etc)

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Sonic Transit Can Help Your Business

• By offering you a Committed Information Rate
  (CIR) SLA
• By providing your WAN with the lowest possible
  latency from source to destination
• By providing a 0 packet loss SLA

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24x7x365 Network Operations Center

• Staffed by Level 3 support personnel at all times
• Customer incident reporting is available by email
  or by phone
• Two-factor authentication for secure access to
  technical support
• For Managed Backbone customers, the customer is
  assigned a dedicated Level 3 engineer
• 1 Hour response time SLA

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Customer Portal

• Tracks topology events that are unique to the
  customer in real time
• Updated continuously with events and news that
  could impact network performance e.g. Hurricanes,
  Earthquakes, War zones, etc
• Users can manage and track service requests
• Users can view bandwidth utilization reports
• Users can manually assign routes to manage the
  network topology

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Our Topology Growth

• 2004
• 3 peering locations in 3 different countries
• Shanghai, Singapore, San Jose
• 2006
• 16 additional peering locations in 14 different
  countries
• Buenos Aires, Santiago, Panama City, Paris,
  Frankfurt, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney,
  Washington D.C., San Diego, Mozambique, Cairo,
  Rio de Janeiro, Bangalore, Manila
• 2007
• 40 addditional peering locations in 36 countries
  by December 2007
• Fiji, Melbourne, Perth, New Delhi,
• Established second Network Operations Center in
  Shanghai, China
• Established European field services office in
  Langenfeld, Germany
• 2008
• Add first leased line international backbone
  segment between Hong Kong and Santiago, Chille
• Add second leased line international backbone
  segment between Hong Kong and Frankfurt, Germany
• Add third leased line international backbone
  segment between Frankfurt, Germany and Washington
  D.C.

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Questions and Answers