Network Overview
Our network is designed on the fundamental premise that sustainable high
performance requires a reliable, high-performance architecture that removes Internet
"traffic jams" and enables true end-to-end performance management. This goal is
achieved not just by "working harder" with a bigger pipe, but by "working
smarter" with a performance-engineered, intelligent network as well.
With daily headlines like "No Shortage of Bottlenecks on the Information
Superhighway"; "Explosive Growth Clogs the Internet's Backbone"; and "Online
Downtime Gives Web Surfers the Blues," it is clear that the general Internet backbone is
plagued with performance limitations. Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and
noted columnist, has even gone so far as to predict the Internet's impending
"catastrophic collapse" due to surging demand and increasingly frequent
black-outs and brown-outs. Given the sheer number of bottlenecks and the
Internet's decentralized nature, it is unlikely that there will be a significant
improvement anytime soon.
To overcome the performance limitations of the
Internet, Excite@Home has developed a high performance "parallel Internet"
(effectively one of the world's largest intranets). While it uses the same
underlying protocols to ensure compatibility and efficient, seamless access to everything on
the Internet, our network architecture is markedly different.
Excite@Home delivers its services over a 5Gbps, Tier 1 fiber-optic IP backbone which links with
other fiber optic and coaxial cable systems (also known as hybrid fiber-coax
or "HFC"). Residential customers access the network via high-speed cable modems,
which attach to their personal computers via a standard Ethernet connection.
@Home's unique high-speed network sits between its customers and the
Internet, and provides a significant competitive advantage, enabling dramatically
better performance, unparalleled reliability, and greater functionality than is
possible over the general Internet backbone.
Two key themes in our network strategy are "pushing data closer" and
"end-to-end management." To embody the first theme, Excite@Home uses a
hierarchical, distributed network architecture with proprietary caching and
replication technologies to ensure that information a customer wants is always
"as close as possible" within the network.
Pushing data
closer resolves one of the Internet's fundamental architectural weaknesses, and
the cause of many of its current performance issues -- highly redundant data
traffic. When you download a video clip from CNN's Web site, for example, you
pull those bits all the way across the Internet from CNN's Web site to their ISP,
through potentially multiple interchanges on the Internet backbone, to your ISP,
and finally to your computer. If your next door neighbor requests the very same
video clip from CNN, he or she also pulls it all the way across the country, across the
Internet backbone, on a similarly convoluted path. The result is that many of
the same bits inefficiently traverse the general Internet backbone over and over.
Excite@Home's approach, in contrast, moves that video over its
high-speed backbone only once and retains it in an @Home
cache close to your home,
becoming efficient "local traffic" provided by a local server when either you
or your neighbor view it. Put simply, our philosophy is to "never move the
same bits twice."
This improved efficiency provides @Home members with
significant speed and reliability by drastically reducing the need for them to
traverse the global Internet to get information. In addition, it dramatically
reduces traffic volume (and corresponding costs) across the backbone, since data
is usually available nearby.
Media companies working with Excite@Home can
achieve a massive bandwidth advantage over the general Internet backbone by using @Home
Network's caching, replication, and hosting features. These features also
considerably reduce the companies' server hardware and communications expenses by
efficiently distributing their traffic volume across the network.
The second
theme, "end-to-end management," describes our proactive network quality,
service, and performance management systems. The network architecture provides
management visibility from @Home servers (or a content partner's servers) all
the way to the customers' PC. Because the network is centrally managed, @Home
can avoid the "finger pointing" that plagues the general Internet backbone, and instead
dynamically identify and address network quality, service, and performance issues
before they ever affect users.
The primary components of our network include
the dual OC-48 (5Gbps) backbone, Points of Presence (POPs), Local Caching Servers, Cable Modems, and the Network Operations Center.