Andre's observations are pretty much the same ones I would make, and in
much more detail. One other thing to understand is the topology of
international connections to the Philippines. It looks as though ALL
cable heads go into Luzon island: Batangas (APCN-2, EAC-C2C, SeaMeWe-3),
Cavite (EAC-C2C), Nagsugbu (Southeast Asia Japan Cable), Currimao
(Asia-America Gateway Cable System), Ballesteros (Tata TGN-Intra Asia),
Daet (Asia Submarine-cable Express (ASE)). The last one, ASE, is the one
that opened in August and significantly boosts capacity. It connects to
directly to Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan.
Andre also asks the important question, what is actually needed? Here
are my suggestions as to key factors and possible answers:
1) Reducing latency for general mapping for as many Filipinos as possible.
It looks as though all Philippine mapper's traffic would get routed
through a network in or around Metro Manila no matter what. Therefore
from a latency point of view alone, and assuming PLDT routing, um,
peculiarities, could be resolved then Manila would be the best place to
put a server. A close second would be Hong Kong ... and might be better
as per Eugene's point.
2) Be able to keep running in the event of a natural calamity (if the
community feels this is an important function to have).
Here, key risk are: the data centre gets hit; connection to the data
centre gets hit; international connection(s) get hit. From that
perspective, it is perhaps best to keep the server outside the country
as there are enough geographically separate international cable heads to
have a low probability that all international connectivity goes down at
once. Hong Kong is seismically stable and infrastructure is built to
withstand super-typhoons. I assume the same for Singapore.
3) Be in a well run data centre with good connectivity at the lowest cost.
As a spiritual Illocano :-), (I am a UK Yorkshireman, which is almost
the same thing), I indeed always put things in the US. Cheap and plenty
of support. The USA is probably too far away for this application, but
Rackspace in Hong Kong looks interesting. The alternative might be a
sweet-heart deal in Manila, perhaps at a call centre??
4) Foster a technical community.
To answer Eugene's point about no one in the OSMPH community is
experienced enough with running and maintaining a server. I see that as
actually part of the point of the exercise, to be able to provide a
foundation for that to grew. From that perspective, Metro Manila would
be good location if physical access were a possibility. A university
perhaps? If physical access is not available, then it doesn't really
matter where the server is as long as you can ssh into it and have
reasonably low-cost support for hardware adjustments and in the event
that restarts and the like do not work.
Hope that helps discussion,
Mike
References:
http://submarine-cable-map-2012.telegeography.com/
http://www.submarinecablemap.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_submarine_communications_cables
http://betterphils.blogspot.se/2012/08/submarine-cable-linked-philippines-hk.html
On 15/09/2012 09:48, an...@enthropia.com wrote:
Hi guys,
Just happened to read this digest when I saw this.
I am not an expert on the local internet infrastructure but from the
people I have talked to, what I understand is, PLDT owns it all and
anyone else gets routed out of the country first before coming back in.
There is a service of PLDT called invitro where PLDT is directly
connected to all local ISPs. It's not cheap to say the least. If you
want to figure out the logistics and pricing I can put you in touch
with Wilson Chua who runs a datacenter here and Bitstop Networking
Solutions.
Is there an actual connection issue with loading the FR server. What
is the latency from various ISPs here in the Philippines? Could it be
resolved by running on Amazon Web Services from Singapore? Or perhaps
renting physical servers from Rackspace in Hong Kong?
Would we want to do it the NGO way via working out a partnership with
Smart/PLDT/ or Globe or go at it the retail customer way and asking
for the best discount possible. Lots of scenarios are possible but
what is actually needed?
Regards,
Andre
On 9/15/12 8:49 AM, Eugene Alvin Villar wrote:
Hello Mike,
Your proposal is actually interesting.
However, I am not actually aware of anyone in the OSMPH community who
is experienced enough with running and maintaining a server here in
the Philippines. The usual strategy I know is that people buy hosting
services from data centers in located the United States.
Also, I am not familiar with the state of the Internet backbone in the
Philippines (PHNET). I'm not 100% sure but I've read of stories where
if you want to access a local server in the Philippines, you might
sometimes get routed first to the United States depending on which
Internet Service Provider you are currently on so having a local
server might not actually help with any netowrk latency issues that
OSM France's solution hopes to solve.
Maybe the people from Enthropia Philippines (who is generously
sponsoring the openstreetmap.org.ph website) can provide some input?
Regards,
Eugene
On Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 12:28 AM, maning sambale
<emmanuel.samb...@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Mike,
Im glad you met Mario in SOTM2012. Also, congrats on finally getting
over
with the license change.
On to the topic, I think the idea of a server is good if this can
help with
poor connections, especially if it can be used for disaster mapping
efforts.
Maybe we can even design our own map style. :-)
Anyway, I know very little about servers so I leave it to others
here to
discuss possibilities and challenges on such a project with osm.fr
Maning Sambale (mobile)
On Sep 14, 2012 11:24 PM, "Michael Collinson" <m...@ayeltd.biz> wrote:
Hallo Maning and all and to Mario Baras who was at SOTM 2012 and is on
this list.
I see from Maning's post to the general talk list that he is already
familar with the French http://live.openstreetmap.fr/. Now here is an
interesting thing. OSM France have also built and are operating a
caching
download/proxy upload server for editing. It down loads diffs
every minute.
JOSM users can re-direct their editors to use it instead of the London
server. There is also a way to trick Potlatch into using it. For
French and
many European users it provides much better response. When you
upload, then
it sends your edit to London. It has been running for 6 months and
appears
to work correctly.
And then another thing: OpenStreetMap France also have funding to do
things. But they cannot spend it in France. Dot, dot, dot.
So I asked Christian Quest, "If there was interest, could they fund a
similar server in the Philippines?" and got a very positive
response with
the caveat that a proposal has to be presented to the funding
organisation
and they can say yes or no. The proposal could consist of a)
server(s), b)
travel by OpenStreetMap France to the Philippines to train (perhaps
not
vital but good to create a working relationship) and c) funding to
put it in
a high availability data centre.
So, any interest?
In addition to helping poor connections (comments?), I see it as a
way to
build up a strong system administration team to complement the mapping
community. The Philippine and Japan communities are probably the
strongest
in Asia right now. I would also suggest that it could be used as a
H.O.T
server to be used in natural calamities if anyone is interested in
getting
involved there ... that might also improve the chances of funding.
Mike
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