Equinix chief sees potential in Thailand

       A carrier neutral data centre in Thailand would become a marketplace that would kick-start the Internet ecosystem and drive down prices for the benefit of users, content providers and infrastructure providers alike.
       Equinix Chief Technologist Lane Patterson.
       Lane Patterson, Chief Technologist at Equinix explained how his company runs one of the region's largest carrier neutral data centres in Singapore and how it was key in the shift of telecommunications power from Japan and Korea down to Singapore over the last five or six years.
       Thailand, with its two percent broadband penetration is full of future potential. The imminent explosion of smart mobile devices will lead to an explosion of innovation in software that depends on the network bandwidth pipe for growth.
       One such Equinix customer used that model and bought bandwidth first in one gigabit per second increments, which soon became 10 gig increments before soon changing the landscape of user generated content. That company is YouTube.
       Today Equinix partners with several major cloud computing operators. They have their data centres situated next to hydro-electric power plants to take advantage of cheap power, and they use Equinix for edge distribution with its presence in 30 of the world's top markets. In other words, by partnering with Equinix anyone will be within 50 milliseconds of 90 percent of the world's web population.
       50ms is just enough for the latest generation of telepresence type solutions. Just a year ago, the codecs could only take 6ms of jitter and had to be run over dedicated networks. In one year there has been an order of magnitude in tolerance and allows telepresence to run over the Internet instead.
       Patterson sees Thailand following the evolution of Japan and Korea with a local Internet for local language content while another track sees faster and better international links for companies to do business and drive the economy.
       Equinix is positioned as a carrier neutral data centre. This is analogous to international airports that are not in the business of running airlines, but of running an airport. By doing so, it creates a marketplace where someone who specialises in sub sea cables can sell bandwidth to someone specialising in financial transactions. Others specialise in broadband or IP TV to the home or regional cables. By bringing these together under one roof a new partnership is as simple as one patch cable, rather than running a leased line across half a city.
       "It is the only way it [the Internet industry] works and scales," Patterson said.
       The first group of clients are typically five or six telcos and Internet companies that sell bandwidth. Second is content, Google Yahoo or Facebook, both for their edge delivery and in many cases actual compute and storage farms.
       Third are the enterprises, either large companies like IBM that integrate systems and run them on behalf of their clients or the actual financial trading companies and banks that are themselves often as big and complicated as a mini-telco.
       On the side there is a whole separate market for caching. Akamai and China Cache use Equinix a lot. These allow consumers to set up a website and have local access speeds across a region instantly.
       All of these players put together under the same roof makes for a very vibrant ecosystem of 30 to 40 players who can make deals and implement them instantly.
       Today Asia still lacks connectivity. The cost of wholesale bandwidth is still six to eight times as much as links between Europe and the United States because of lack of infrastructure. Only recently have companies such as Tata, Reliance and KDDI risen to this challenge, he said.
       The consumer always wants faster broadband at a lower cost. Patterson said that putting aside the regulatory issues that are difficult to fix, a carrier neutral data centre much like Equinix would help Thailand to achieve that target. Would Equinix itself be interested in investing? Patterson said he was looking at the market.
       By 2010 or 2011, the new 100 GBPS Ethernet standard will have arrived in the market. What this means is that the older 40G or 10G links which used to be premium will become commoditised as financial companies and telcos move to 100G and therefore more affordable for the rest of us.
       The economic crisis seemed like it did not happen as broadband Internet has become an unstoppable force. People are now accustomed having untethered access to things rather than having to check their email in the office or Internet cafe.
       One study in the United States asked people if they would rather give up their television or their broadband during the economic crisis and most said they would rather give up television.