The Mega-Network, Past and Present
Current Deployment…
Since '98, MegaNet has grown outward from our Fall River, MA headquarters to include facilities in Boston, MA, Providence, RI and New York City, allowing us to offer services in almost every locale from southern New Hampshire to New York. To accommodate this growth, our upstream T1 connections have been retired in favor of an array of 45 megabit T3 connections to various backbone providers, including UUNet, AT&T, Sprint, Cable & Wireless and others. Earlier this year, we installed a cluster of servers from Akamai Technologies, a firm specializing in supercharging access speed to web content and streaming media, allowing ultra-quick access to many of the web's most popular sites.
In the Fall of 2000, MegaNet began research into what became the most comprehensive and ambitious network overhaul to date - transitioning to an ATM/Frame-Relay core. This project aimed to increase overall performance, centralize network management, and perhaps most importantly, to prepare for our latest service offering, dubbed "MegaFrame" (see http://www.meganet.net/wanrelay.htm). Tentatively planned for late-June completion, the transition was completed a full two months ahead of schedule, on April 27, 2001.
The current Mega-Network includes four physical locations, connected to each other via a combination of 155Mbps OC-3 and 45Mbps T3, in a semi-meshed fashion to enhance resiliency. Our "border" routers (the BGP-speakers mentioned previously) are still Cisco (7500 and 7200 series), while our core and edge (customer-facing) has been moved to Lucent B-STDX 9000 frame-relay/ATM switches.
Future Plans
Without exception, each of MegaNet's network upgrades resulted in a serene, comfortable feeling among our executive management, fostered by the thought that we've built out everything we could possibly need for the foreseeable future. This feeling, of course, has always proved fleeting as the collective creative juices have never stopped flowing.
Plans for the near future include migrating the core network off of the Lucent B-STDX switches, to ATM-only Lucent CBX-500 switches, leaving the frame-relay/ATM switches at the edge facing our high-speed customers.
What next? Who knows? But check here often - bigger and better things are always on the horizon.
Typical Meganet Customer Aggregation POP
Network Backbone Map
