Internet

Oxygen project; Computer publishing house "Peter"

As you know, the Internet is a network, and every network consists of knots and threads connecting these nodules. The explosive increase in the popularity of the Internet, lasting more than one year, leads to the fact that the throughput of threads connecting network nodes is constantly lagging behind users. And if the speed of the notorious “last mile” is the private business of the user and his local provider, then the speeds of Internet channels connecting individual countries and continents are problems of a truly global nature, which requires considerable money and fresh ideas. One of the attempts to resolve this issue will be described further.

The history of intercontinental communication channels began in 1858, when the first telegraph cable was laid through the Atlantic. This outstanding engineering project made it possible to radically reduce the time of information from the United States to England. If earlier any letters had to be taken by sea, and it lasted at least a week, then by telegraph the letter was transmitted in a couple of minutes. When, after several decades, the telegraph began to be replaced by the phone, the telephone cable was also stretched along the bottom of the ocean, since this was already familiar.

At first, the telephone conversation through the ocean was a great luxury, as well as the phone itself, but over time, this service became more and more mass. The volume of intercity negotiations grew slowly - in response to a decrease in tariffs and simplifying the service itself - for example, the possibility of calling without a telephone operator. This happened for decades, and even the emergence of a facsimile connection that used the telephone channels did not change the situation, since the transfer of faxes was only a small percentage of the total telephone traffic.

Traffic itself grew very smoothly - for about 10 percent of the year, which allowed telephone mowers to easily predict future needs for communication channels. When the horizon was necessary in the new intercontinental cable, the consortium of large telecommunication companies calculated its required capacity based on the expected growth in traffic in the coming decades.

A similar organization of communication is initially designed for perennial contracts between companies, which can be very difficult to change. In addition, the laying of cables according to the old model provides a connection type of point-to-point, and the network built on such connections is very difficult to change.

As a result, distant connections in the current networks require a lot of time and labor, which, of course, affects the price. For example, during a telephone conversation between Sweden and India, it is necessary to access the resources of several transnational networks, and will agree with their owners on transit payment. Since international telephone calls are far from frequent business for an ordinary person, earlier these difficulties were quite tolerant, especially since most people usually did not know anything about them. Unfortunately, the Internet sharply exacerbated these problems.

The explosive growth of the World Wide Web made the growth of Internet traffic unpredictable. If the volume of telephone negotiations is still growing by the same 10 percent per year, then it is enough to appear on the Internet any next format of the network video, and millions of people begin to actively use it (at least out of curiosity) thereby clogging and so overloaded channels. Although various mechanisms of bypassing transport traffic jams are based on the network protocols, traffic jams on such channels often become insurmountable, since global communication channels are laid on the point of the point.

In addition to this, on specific routes, Internet traffic is subject to very rapid changes caused by various events. So, say, in the first days after the death of Princess Diana, a site dedicated to her funeral was visited by about 16 million people, and another 50 million could not do this, since both the site and communication channels were overloaded.

Obviously, after only a few weeks, the influx of visitors to this site was already thousands of times less. Similar stories have been repeated many times in recent years, and it became obvious that global communication channels developed in the pre-Internet era are less satisfied with modern needs, and we must come up with something new. So the Oxygen project appeared.

Oxygen, or, in Russian, "oxygen", is a project of a global fiber-optic network, the length of which will be 168m thousand km, of which 154 thousand will be laid along the bottom of the window. Students can imagine a giant ring laid in the Atlantic Ocean along the coast of North and South America, Europe and Africa, from which branches that go to land and connected to local ground networks depart in many places. Later, it is planned to lay similar rings in the Pacific and Indian Ocean, and at the final stage of the ring they will be interconnected by forming the first truly global network.

The total cost of this titanic project is still unclear, and so far the funds are collected only for its first, Atlantic phase, 26 thousand kilometers long and worth about $ 15 billion. Why do you need to spend such huge amounts?

First of all, to create a fundamentally new network architecture, which has never arisen on such a global scale. The giant ring, to which dozens of countries will be connected, already because of its geometry will be much more effective than many old cables, each of which connects only two points. In addition, Oxygen should embody the latest achievements both in the field of equipment and in data transfer standards.

The network will be based on the combined use of ATM/SDH protocols, which will provide the necessary flexibility with sharp changes in traffic, give a guarantee of the quality of the communication channel, and will also allow you to freely transfer data from any type - from high -clearing television channels to ordinary Internet IP packets. Such a mode as a Broadcasting will be implemented, in which one message can simultaneously go to several addresses, and its copies are created only on the "forks" of the network channels. Until now, this regime is not used in international networks, although its need, for example, for a network television, is obvious to everyone.

Of course, the most important issue for the entire project is its total throughput. According to the latest estimates, the speed of the Atlantic segment should be two and a half terabitis per second, i.e. Two and a half thousand gigabit. Such a capacity, combined with a unique topology, will already provide, according to the initiators of the project, access to 90-and percent of the entire world traffic. When creating the rest of the segments, this figure will increase even more, and in addition, the capacity of the channels will be constantly reviewed, due to the emergence of new capabilities among contractors and the development of fiber -optic technologies themselves.

The entire OXYGEN network will have its own control system, including, after the completion of the entire project, three managing centers located in England, the USA and Singapore. This centralization should ensure the unique flexibility and reliability of the entire network. With a break in one segment of the ring, the system will ensure automatically restoration of traffic within three hundred milliseconds. Management centers will maintain the ability to control the working resources even if two network segments are out of order, and the ring will be torn into separate parts.

The ultimate goal of the implementation of the entire Oxygen project will be a sharp drop in the prices for connections. It is expected that the prices for international telephone conversations will cease to differ in price from the locals, since the costs of their tariffing will cease to pay off. (Such a forecast, of course, is real only when you compete with several telephone companies.) The cost of accessing the Internet will fall even more, and the load on it from a separate user will increase. At the same time, the stability of data transmission over the network will increase, and delays and overload will be found less often. Surely international network television will appear, and, with the development of local cable networks, household video telphones will become massive.

Listeners, fascinated by such a bright future, may ask: when will it come? And will it come? To implement the project in 1997, a special company Project Oxygen LTD was created, registered on Bermuda Islands. The key figure in this company and the whole project, its creator and chief manager, is Neil Tagare (Neil Tagare), a person quite famous in telecommunication circles.

On the website of the company, located at www.projectoxygen.com, you can find about a dozen interviews and articles from a variety of publications dedicated to the project. From these articles it follows that the company will have to start in the middle of this year to the implementation of the first phase. However, in the section of the site dedicated to financing, it is said that the largest investors who managed to attract are two Israeli telecommunication companies, which invested about three hundred million dollars in October last year. At the same time, to start laying the first line of the project, which will connect the coast of the United States and England, at least three billion dollars are needed.

At first glance, all this global undertaking may seem to listeners a beautiful but not wealthy adventure. The laying of intracancing cables is a very expensive and complicated thing. They are usually laid at a time, special vessels, and if huge cable coils are not placed on one vessel, then a dense group of several ships carries them across the ocean. It is better not to think about the difficulties of repairing gaps in such cables at all.

Fortunately for Oxygen -a, his head is Neil Tagar, not a beginner in this matter. From the age of 89, he participated in the Flag project - laying the first private underwater cable to connect England and Japan. Tagar worked on Flag first as the author of the idea, and then as the head of the owner of the entire project. Flag successfully ended in 1997, and, stretching through the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean at 25 thousand km, became the longest underwater cable in the world.

Although Flag, Kak and was supposed to become a very profitable enterprise, its implementation was greatly inhibited by powerful communication lobbies. Obviously, the same slingshots have to overcome Oxygen-y. The annual market for international telephone conversations is estimated at about a hundred billion dollars, and if Oxygen promises to make them almost free, this certainly does not like this.

Meanwhile, the Tagar continues to advertise his new project, offering everyone who wants to buy resources of a not yet built system. With this money, and on various kinds of loans, he expects to build a network. The proposed prices look very tempting. For example, a standard channel with a speed of 45 megabit per second, which is called the TE-Dine in network circles, is sold for 416 thousand dollars, plus an annual contribution of 16 thousand. It should be taken into account that this is not a fixed line between some two geographical points, but part of the capacity of the entire Oxygen project.

For comparison, a satellite canal with the same speed costs about one and a half to two million dollars. If we add to this that such a satellite canal can transfer data only in one direction, and the life lifetime usually does not exceed ten years, and Oxygen is designed for 25 years, it is obvious that Tagar’s proposal looks very tempting. The company's website claims that the resources of the future network have already been sold worth a billion dollars.

Unfortunately, the beginning of work on the implementation of the Oxygen project is constantly postponed. It was originally planned that the work would begin at the end of 99th and the construction of the first phase will last a year and a half. Then the start of the project was transferred to the middle of this summer, but it is likely that by this time the necessary funds would not be able to collect.

Be that as it may, it is obvious that the needs of all mankind in a global and fast connection will only intensify over time. Oxygen or not Oxygen, but if the Internet does not slow down its development, then sooner or later something similar to the Tagar project must appear.

Radio "Freedom", the program "Seventh Continent". In conclusion - Mikhail Kretschmer about the publishing house "Peter", publishing computer literature

Krechmer

Our regular listeners know that the “Seventh Continent” program has repeatedly turned to the books on the Internet published by us and abroad. We talked about Esther Dyson and her book “Life in the Internet of the Internet”, talked with John Levin, the author of the book “The Internet for Teapies”, flipped through the “Yellow Pages of the Internet” Harley Khan. We also met the authors of the "yellow pages" of Russian -speaking resources.

We paid attention to books for professionals, but most of all - to those that help to recognize the Internet with ordinary users, its mass consumer. Therefore, simply written volumetric reference books and tonyable tutorials in 75 - 80 - 100 sheets welcomed.

Today, dozens of books on this topic have been published in the country. The era of self -taught on the Internet ends. Pioneers with pickles in their hands give way to people armed with modern knowledge. The book on the Internet is now not so rare, there are good among them, although here we enter into the twilight zone of discussion, since the concept of "good book" is for each its own.

We talked about books, less often - about their authors and very few - about those who publish these books. Therefore, I decided to contact the St. Petersburg Publishing House "Peter" to find out the details about the publishing house that today issues books about computers, the Internet and everything connected with them more than anyone else in the country. My interlocutors were the promotion manager Valery Saidov and the head of the editorial board of computer literature Ekaterina Stroganova.

Publishing house "Peter" originated in 1991. At first, three young people began to engage in computers themselves, and not by publishing books about them - they equipped computer classes. Then they decided to try themselves in publishing. The first book appeared. It was not even a book, but a pamphlet "ZX Spectrum for users and programmers." It was dedicated to the same computers with which training classes were equipped. Then there was a fire, the circulation was burning, their remnants tried to somehow realize. After that, they decided to publish another book, then another one.

Today, the Publishing House "Peter" is considered one of the largest in the territory of the former union. Here, figuratively speaking, a book on business, psychology, and medicine is published every 4 seconds. This is educational, developing and popular science literature. "Peter" fundamentally does not publish fiction, the slogan under which the publishing house works: "The necessary books are the necessary knowledge." There are branches and representative offices of the publisher in several countries.

It is difficult to deal with the book business in Russia, ”says Valery Saidov. He confirms the idea that it is difficult to engage in any business in Russia. And, especially, a book that is very specific and differs from any other. I realized that I decided to tell about the publishing house at the time of his perestroika. The fact is that the book business, according to the experts of this publishing house, is included in its new stage, since the market in Russia is close to its saturation. At least in Moscow and St. Petersburg the situation is assessed that way. So, more complex marketing research, painstaking work to identify market needs and promotion of products are needed. Of course, now more actively and competently will have to work with the regions. In "Peter" this is taken into account, because their business is seriously treated. Moreover, a series of business and marketing published here allows you to receive information and knowledge from first -hand much earlier than competitors. Including, here they translate and print the works of Philip Kotler, built in our country to the rank of father of all marketers.

Fine. But what about computer literature and books on the Internet? Let's start with such a figure: last year, 70 items about computers and the Internet were published here. If you run through the series, then they are probably known to many: “Brief course”, “Effective work”, “For professionals”, “Anatomy PC”, “reference books”. "Textbooks". As it is already clear from the names of these series, here they are counting on the reader of different things - from who does not know anything, to the very one, no, a professional.

If you paid attention, the “yellow pages” of Harley Khan, were published and published in “Peter”, “yellow pages” of Russian resources, magazines “World Internet” and “Byte/Russia” are also here.

I will not list everything that is published in Peter, this is not included in my task. But I will say a few words about the last and interesting books. Already at the beginning of 2000, several books were published, including the "Encyclopedia of the Internet" and "a clear self-study of the computer handling." I would not call these books a new generation of books about computers, but it seems to me that it is useful to have them in your library. The encyclopedia is convenient, we can say - quite traditional. Her second edition has already been released.

А вот самоучитель необычный, я бы назвал его не то что "для начинающих", а для "еще не начавших начинать". В основу книги положен принцип по возможности отойти от формы привычных самоучителей - обычно строгих и последовательных, строящихся, как правило, по принципу вопрос-ответ. Авторы этого самоучителя Филлипов и Выскубов спрашивают: "Можно ли ждать внятного вопроса от новичка, который понятия не имеет о чем спрашивать, поскольку не знает вообще ничего?" Состояние многих из таких новичков при общении с компьютером близко к паническому и, наверное, одна из главных задач авторов - справиться с этой паникой.

Начиная с нуля в ту пору, когда многое начиналось с нуля, "Питер" достиг такого уровня, что вполне спокойно чувствует себя на международных выставках, например, на последней, летней, в Чикаго. И на вопрос: "Чем работа вашего издательства отличается от работы зарубежных издательств?" здесь отвечают примерно так: "Теперь уже мало чем. Проблемы у нас те же: поиск тем, издание необходимой книги, проблемы продаж. Правда, о н и своим бизнесом занимаются десятки, сотню и более лет, а мы - еще нет и десяти".

Своим неудачным проектом здесь считают мультимедийный. Несколько лет назад было решено издавать компьютерные программы на компакт-дисках, но от него быстро отказались из-за слабой защиты интеллектуальной собственности. Это оказалось делом невыгодным и неблагодарным.

А в общем, бизнес идет, типографские машины работают, читатель получает новые книги, а вместе с ними - необходимые знания...

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