Brennan and Kevin Cut Another Deal

That would be Brennan Carley of Spread Networks and Kevin Formby of Endace. Sometime very soon - maybe by the time you read this - Spread will be posting continuous latency figures on www.spreadnetworks.com for its NYC to Chicago fibre service, courtesy of Endace's latency monitoring appliance.

It won't be the first time that these two folk have struck a deal. Industry folklore has it that, ways back as the world ushered in the new millennium, these two gents took time off from their Christmas breaks to hammer out a deal between Reuters (as it was known before it sucked itself into Thomson) and Equant, that was to lead to the creation of Radianz (in June 2000). Brennan was on the Reuters side, although he moved on after a while to join Nyfix, and then Spread. Kevin was on the Equant side, and he stayed at Radianz through its out-spin to BT, and only recently joined Endace.

The service that Spread will be deploying Endace to measure is the low latency Ethernet wave service that it introduced last month. It provides either 1 gigabit or 10 gigabit connections with a service level agreement (SLA) of 15.75 milliseconds round-trip (though it says that customers are experiencing actual latency of less than 15.50 milliseconds).

Exactly what latency stats will be published wasn't finally decided when I last asked, but they could include averages and 99.9th percentile over periods of a minute, an hour, a day, and a week. It will depend a bit on what customers say they want.

Now, 15.75 is pretty damn fast - a shade faster than the SLA offered by rival Anova Technologies - but it's definitely slow lane compared to the dark fiber service that Spread launched in June, which has an SLA of 13.33 milliseconds, as tested on networking equipment from any of ADVA Optical Networking, Ciena, Infinera and JDSU. So what gives with the slower service?

According to the company, the wave service - which is using network gear from an unspecified vendor - is positioned for a different segment of the market, compared to the dark fibre offering. A segment where latency is not so important, but cost certainly is.

The new service is "engineered" to address this segment, says the company. Which is a great use of the word "engineered." Because really the engineering refers mainly to its product positioning, as fastest at a particular service need/price point.

The technical engineering probably involves deploying a coil of fibre about 150 miles in length at one end, simply to slow down the service. That's my guess, anyway. The company is pretty coy about its technology, so if I am wrong, I doubt there will be a request for a formal correction.

As well as the wave service, Spread also recently announced co-location facilities at both ends of its fibre, and in the middle of the route (which unfortunately happens to be Cleveland, OH) for companies wanting to operate equi-distant trading strategies.

In Chicago, the co-lo is at the popular 350 East Cermak Road building, while the 'NYC' end is actually at 14 Self Boulevard, in Carteret, NJ. It turns out that 14 Self is literally around the corner from the popular 1400 Federal Boulevard facility, which is the center of Nasdaq's world, and which also houses a Verizon data center.

Spread has deployed its own fibre between the two buildings, and is working with certain metro network providers - that it's not yet naming - for direct connectivity into other area data centers, bypassing Verizon's hub.