Raising the speed limit on the Web
There was an interview in yesterday's The Australian newspaper with my colleague [Aconex CTO] David Chatterton, about our recent adoption of web-acceleration technology called Akamai.
I'll save you the techno-detail about exactly how Akamai works (sighs of relief all round), but it's explained here if you are keen to know. In a nutshell Akamai uses a number of advanced techniques to drastically speed up the delivery of web content. They basically have their own, alternative internet that is a lot less busy than the one we all use day-to-day. For the end user, the experience of browsing, uploading and downloading data is completely unchanged - except that it's noticeably faster than before. Some big-hitters like Amazon.com, Apple, Adobe, Cathay Pacific, MySpace, Toyota and Yahoo are already using the technology to improve the online experience for their customers.
So what does this mean for Aconex users on construction and engineering projects? Well, not much if you're working on a local project, with all the team members in the same location. Where it really comes to the fore is when organisations are based in different countries. For example, we did some tests sending a 10MB file between Melbourne and London and on average it was about 30% faster when using Akamai. That's quite a time saving for an architect or Doc Controller working with large files all day.
The benefit is even greater when transferring information between countries that have poor or instable local internet connectivity - in some cases we saw an improvement of 300%. Leigh mentioned in a post recently that we were doing some projects in Libya where the head contractor was based in New York, so these guys are really seeing the difference. For them, it's almost like sending a file across town.
So what's the impact on real measures like time and cost? A few weeks ago, Australia's largest telecoms provider launched what it claims is the world's fastest mobile broadband service, with a peak download speed of 21Mbps, increasing to 42Mbps later this year. To coincide with the launch, they released the results of an independent study which concludes that faster mobile broadband could add 0.7% to GDP.
Transposed to a construction project, it's reasonable to say that, by boosting the speed of accessing and distributing information by 30%, you can increase productivity. No hard-fact case studies on this yet, but it's exciting to think about how advances in the speed of managing information can impact the project bottom line.
Labels: Technology
