A day in the life of the Internet: San Jose, Calif.

By Jeff CarusoSAN JOSE, CALIF., JANUARY 19 -- One of the first things you notice about MAE West is that it really has afantastic view.

No cramped basement here. MAE West stretches out comfortably on the 10thfloor of a building in downtown San Jose, with large windows gazing outonto a cityscape framed by the Santa Cruz mountains in the distance.

The large lead-acid battery used to provide backup power to the MAE takesup a corner office that many executives struggling up the corporate ladderwould kill for.It may seem strange to give a network access point (NAP) such prime realestate - but this is Silicon Valley, ground zero of the InternetRevolution. The Internet is king here.

MAE West itself is much smaller than you might think. After all, this iswhere traffic from an array of Internet service providers intersects. Whilethis function makes the NAP critical, however, it doesn't mean the NAP hasto be huge.

At its heart, it's composed of three ATM switches, six FDDI switches, ahandful of Ethernet switches and a bank of cross-connects, all enclosed ina chain-link cage. The rest of the room is dominated by rows of black metalcabinets that look like they could be Darth Vader's gym lockers. Thecabinets contain routers and switches co-located by a variety of ISPs. Moreco-located devices are up on the 11th floor.

Another piece of MAE West lies several miles to the north, at NASA's AmesResearch Center. Several FDDI switches there share the load.

Today, there doesn't seem to be a lot of excitement at MAE West, which ishow MCI Worldcom likes it. "You don't see anybody running around with theirhair on fire," grins Dan Lasater, director of broadband applications.

Naturally, it's not always this calm. The most common problem is an outagefor an individual ISP, which MCI Worldcom will help trace to the ISP'sequipment or the connection to it. Sometimes a card in a switch will fail,putting a larger burden on the other switches.

The worst incident was when an entire FDDI switch failed, Lasater recalls."When you lose that much, it sometimes thrashes" as traffic tries to cramthrough the remaining switches, he says. Though the company keeps spares onsite, it took a few hours to get things back to normal.

The network operations center is actually in Dallas, Texas. If anythingbreaks, that center knows first, and dispatches someone at the San Josesite to fix it. That center also watches the other MAE sites around thecountry.

Two nets in one

The network of Digital Equipment Corp.'s GIGAswitch/FDDI is actuallyseparate from the ATM network. The FDDI network came first, and at almost 2Gbit/sec during peak hours, it's functioning nearly at capacity, Lasatersays, even though each of the six switches has a 3.2 Gbit/sec backplane.About 75 ISPs connect through the FDDI portion of the NAP, and no more arebeing added.

On most days, including this one, traffic peaks around the middle of theday, between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. Anyone who wants to obtain recent trafficstatistics for MAE West or any other MAE can find them at www.mae.net.

New customers are encouraged to use the ATM portion of the NAP, installedless than a year ago. Each of the Cisco StrataCom BPX switches has 10G bit/sec of capacity, which has only started to be tapped by the 20 or soISP connections.

Attracting ISPs to the NAP can be challenging. "A NAP is a chicken-and-eggproblem if you think about it," Lasater says. The reason for co-locating ata NAP is to connect directly with other ISPs there. "If you don't haveanybody there, why would anybody come?" Lasater asks.

MCI Worldcom chose ATM as the way to connect new ISPs because it's moremature than other connection technologies, he says. Gigabit Ethernet lookspromising, but it's still too new, since standards for it were completedonly last year. Packet over Sonet is also being considered, but it alsohasn't been used widely, Lasater says.

ATM, by contrast, has been used for several years and has proven itself, hesays. It will also help the NAP deal with the explosive growth of theInternet. Most connections to the ATM switches are at 155M bit/sec and 622M bit/sec. Although 45M bit/sec connections are available, most ISPs don'teven bother with that slow a speed, Lasater says. And ATM can easily scaleup to gigabits per second.

In the midst of the rapid growth of the Internet, part of MAE West's job isto stay one step ahead of the ISPs in providing capacity. As more ISPsco-locate their equipment at the NAP, the more power is needed to run it all.

If the power were to fail, a generator in the basement would kick in afterabout a minute. As an added backup, the battery in that corner office wouldprovide power to MAE West and all the co-located equipment for about fourhours. The battery is so large and heavy that it had to be bolted to thebuilding frame, and it rests on what looks like a girder just above thefloor.

Apparently, that's not enough power. Today, a couple of electricians arehere planning the installation of more capacity, another battery.

The existing battery is enough for today's network, Lasater explains. "Butyou noticed that not all the [co-location] cabinets are full," he says.

Read the stories of individual NAPs by clicking on their city name below:

MAE West overview

Forum: The state of the 'Net
Discuss it with Dan Lasater, director of broadband applications and MAE architect for MCI WorldCom.