First, I would like to thank all the people who believe in Network Atlas and have helped it get to where it is today. Network Atlas is at its heart a community concept, and it is energizing to see so many of you excited about its potential and interested in making it better.
To that end, the Network Atlas team will be spending the next month working feverishly to improve the product and get it ready for 2019. I am very excited to announce the following list of features that should come online early next year:
Cable system operation status allows users to see which segments are up/down/partial and their last outage, along with textual details of previous outages with potential for links
Cable system information - length, activation date, and estimated end-of-life
Fast page load time of <5 secs for users within the US
3D data center locations
“Buy capacity” - a form that generates an email to a specified cable owner
Report-an-issue on routes for users to send feedback
Ability for users to receive email notifications about cable status changes ,Option to show subsea cables only , Option to show active cables only, Option to show future cables only
A Time Machine function that will show cables that will be active in the future
Ability to add custom fields in select or all cables to show information such as latency3-tiered Network Atlas Cable
Management UI: Users can:Add/Delete/Replace
I can’t wait to share this next phase of Network Atlas with you all. Once it’s complete, it will truly be “one map to rule them all.”
Next up, let me address the elephant in the room. As many of you know, Network Atlas’ Kickstarter for $100K for 2019 funding came up short of meeting its goal(we cancelled it before the time because many of you reached out wanting to support directly not via Kickstart). However, it was an excellent learning experience, as it provided a chance to interact with potential donors and hear their questions. One of those questions was if Network Atlas could show its 3-year plan for the project. In the interest of transparency, I would like to share with you Network Atlas’ proposed 3-year operating budget as of today.
Month of December, we will freeze adding new fiber routes to Network Atlas, this will allow us to focus on working the 10 feature we have explained above. If you want to upload fiber routes you own and authorized, feel free to go to https://kmzs.networkatlas.org and upload them and please include your email address in the file name (or create a colder with readme in it) so we can reach back with questions. Our self-service portal will solve this issue in January :)
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
Have a wonderful December, and a happy new year!
Mehmet