The explosive growth of WWW traffic results in fast saturation of any available WAN bandwidth. While usually bandwidth of local or metro area networks is plentiful, the international links are usually much more expensive and scarce resource. In fact even inevitable increase of the available bandwidth will still be only a short term solution, since the consumption of network bandwidth with services like WWW will quickly outstrip any possible investments. Recent figures prove that higher and higher percentage of all Internet traffic is generated by WWW applications.
With this in mind we have decided that the situation is mature enough for implementation of a well architected solution to tunnel the WWW traffic to optimize the utilization of available bandwidth. To this end a scalable skeleton of national WWW cache centers will be designed and put into operation according to the project schedule (provided we can gather adequate funding support). The project underway is carried out by the cache sites with good connectivity to their regional networks as well as to the backbone. We have a 'mutual parents' arrangement with a similar US based project carried out by NLANR as well as with other projects in France, Germany and UK.
The W3cache system is intended for use by users from Poland to:
The ircache list archive is available online.
We make some of the usage statistics public.
| Town | Institution | Name |
|---|---|---|
| Gdansk | TASK | Michal Kaczorowski |
| Katowice | Uniwersytet Slaski | Maciej Uhlig |
| Krakow | AGH | Jaroslaw Strzalkowski |
| Krakow | Politechnika Krakowska | Marcin Klimowski |
| Lodz | LODMAN | Piotr Goczal |
| Poznan | POZMAN | |
| Warszawa | ICM | Wojtek Sylwestrzak |
| Wroclaw | Politechnika Wroclawska | Tomasz Surmacz |