Summersault Weblog

When Summersault was first starting up and were sharing office space with the folks at Infocom, a local ISP now defunct, I remember the talk at the time about creating a wide-reaching local area network in the Richmond area that would allow network traffic flowing from one local organization to another to be routed directly, instead of taking the default circuitous route through the organization’s ISP, the national level point of presence, and then back down through the destination’s ISP. It seemed like such a good idea, and though Infocom did some peering with Earlham and RP&L, the local power company, things never really moved beyond that as far as I knew.

Today, that “dream” is very much a reality in the form of Parallax, a subsidiary of the power company that is operated locally to “enhance the telecommunications infrastructure in and around Richmond, Indiana and to create a valuable factor for economic development.” As great as those broad goals are, one very tangible benefit is that so much of our network traffic is staying local, and that there are now even more highly knowledgeable network engineers thinking about how best to meet networking and bandwidth needs specific to our community.

Summersault currently uses Parallax as our upstream bandwidth provider. Between Parallax and Summersault, we probably collectively host the websites and e-mail services for a fairly high percentage of the Wayne County businesses that have an online presence of any sort. So when those folks e-mail each other, visit each other’s web pages, and otherwise make use of the network to communicate, that information doesn’t have to travel far at all. I’d venture to say that page load times and e-mail delivery times would be well above average for what one would expect using a mishmash of regional and national ISPs.

And as Parallax expands its offerings from high speed business connections into wireless and DSL services, we can expect residential customers and other organizations to benefit from this too. I look forward to the day when the route from my house to the office is no longer:

1) Insight Communications` local equipment
2) Somewhere in Eaton, Ohio
4) Detroit, Michigan
3) Dayton, Ohio
4) Parallax
5) Summersault

and is just

1) Parallax
2) Summersault

When you can, support your local ISP!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 31st, 2005 at 12:55 am and is filed under Richmond Happenings, Internet / Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.