IT@NUS Sep 2009: Faster Internet Services with New POP in Hong Kong

NUS Internet Connects to
Hong Kong
— Gong Wei

Since the initial setup of NUS' first overseas Point of Presence or POP in short in North America, Computer Centre has progressively established traffic exchange peering arrangement with esteemed North American Institutions such as Caltech, Stanford, Duke, Berkeley and MIT, fostering and increasing the frequency of research collaborations. General user experience has been intrinsically enhanced by direct access to these institutes and other popular North American content providers.

Since June 2009, this advancement has been further strengthened by the establishment of a second NUS overseas POP in Hong Kong. Located in the largest state-of-the-art data centre building in Hong Kong, the newly established POP brings a much closer linkage to Asia-based institutes.

Before this new POP was set up, access response time to Hong-Kong-based sites (eg. the Chinese University of Hong Kong or CUHK) was typically in the range of 70 milliseconds (ms) while that of China-based sites (eg. the China Science & Technology Network or CSTNET) is in the range of 270 ms to 300 ms. Immediately after connections were established, access response improved by 233% and 428% to 30 ms and 70 ms respectively.

With more traffic exchange peering to be established in the coming months, NUS would be closer to more Asia-based institutes, further enhancing research and collaboration experience.