5 Tb/s of new capacity connected in six months at France-IX. The latest report from ARCEP, the French telecoms regulator, measured it.
5 Tb/s of new capacity: it is nice to communicate about it, but the most useful information is to look at the net figure: +3.5 Tb/s.
The difference (1.5 Tb/s) comes from a simple mechanism: when a customer moves, for example, from 100G to 400G, we add 400G and remove 100G at the same time.
In total, that is 35 Tb/s of installed capacity, and 3.5 Tb/s of bandwidth.
Beyond the physical ports these indicators represent, two thirds of our network is usually empty.
So why do we, collectively, overprovision?
In peering, available capacity is not meant to be filled all the time, but rather to absorb peaks. And yes, like everything in this world of infrastructure, traffic fluctuates. And we size for the peak.
This is easy to understand when we talk about moments the general public knows, such as the World Cup final or the announcement of presidential election results.
If a network runs at 90% of its capacity in normal times, it cannot absorb these peaks without degradation.
Overprovisioning is what allows an IXP to keep its availability commitments even in the months when everything happens at once.
And yet, if we apply this to a world that is just as physical, but more visible in daily life, we can see how much we could change things.
A train, a bus, a road are sized for the peak (and in our daily lives, we can feel that the clipping was quite strong, perhaps more than the 95th percentile!). It is “enough” to organise flows differently for the load to suddenly be smoothed.
That is what Octopus Energy does by optimising the charging of electric vehicles and the heating of hot-water tanks.
That is what the Montpellier metropolitan area did by moving university start times back by 15 minutes.
That is what we could do in schools, with very small classes or with 2 teachers per class, by ending the mechanism of imposed holiday dates, even if staggered across 3 zones, or by “converting” most public holidays into days of leave.
And we, in telecoms, have optimised routes, very widely. We have shortened distances, played on space, but not yet on time. So, how do we get started on smoothing the flows?
Peering Plus
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