If you haven't already read the last part of this series, you should do that first, you can find that here.
Acquiring "Customers"
So now that there's a functioning network, I need to somehow afford this. I have been funding it all myself to this point and well, that can't continue as I became unemployed sometime during this point. So I had to get some customers. I used good old word of mouth to sell some services at cost. In fact, I still sell services basically at cost, which you can take a look at here: https://ryamer.com/. For privacy reasons I can't share who's paying but hey there are a few now. I haven't marketed anything and just use word of mouth to keep growing. Thank you customers for helping the network grow!
Adding More Internet Exchanges
So now we are at a point of growing, I decided it was time to add another internet exchange. FCIX is great and all, but the other networks that are connected to it aren't that big, and it is only present in the 2 Hurricane Electric datacenters in the region, so the chance of a big network who we'd want to share traffic with being there is kinda slim. Hence came in SFMIX. We attempted to connect to SFMIX. But for some reason our connection didn't work. After trying some things over a few months(including different transceivers, different ports, and checking the fiber was good) we realized that the fiber needed to be rolled(fiber works off light, and there's a fiber pair with 2 cables, one carrying traffic that we transmit, and we receive data on the other fiber, but the connection was flipped so both sides of the connection were trying to send data on the same port, which doesn't work without using a special type of optic) and after we did that, our connection to the IX came up! Hooray. We managed to push off quite a bit of traffic to this internet exchange, with large peers like Google, Facebook, CloudFlare and Amazon being present at this internet exchange.
Bit weird to read, but the orange section is the % of traffic that came in through SFMIX in our SF region, it's a decent bit.
While we do have to pay for SFMIX, it costs a lot less than paying for transit from another provider, and so it's worth it.
Adding More Transit Capacity
At this point, our only transit capacity is still a 1G line from Hurricane Electric. We have 2x10G ports to 2 IX's so we can defiantly surpass 1G of traffic, but traffic that uses the Hurricane Electric transit port doesn't gets capped at 1G. So we looked into 10G transit at the datacenter. One bad part about going with Hurricane Electric's datacenter is that there's not too many options for buying IP transit. But we bought bought some resold Arelion from another network who had a wave to another local datacenter that Arelion is present at. We got a 10G line but only have 1G of commit on the port. What that means for us is that if we surpass 1gbps of traffic measured at the 95th percentile(basically the top 5% of measurements, which are generally done every 5 minutes, on the port are discarded, then we are charged for the highest of that traffic, so if we used 10gbps for 6% of the month, we get charged for 10gbps, but if we used 10gbps for 4% of the month, and the port was at 999 mbps for the rest of the month, we would not be charged any extra) and now have even more network capacity at the datacenter. We take care to look at what the traffic is monthly
Story So Far
We've been set up, and are growing and adding capacity. Quickly.