In Spain’s recent general election the Ministry of the Interior ambitiously chose to make the information coming in from the polling stations available in real-time to users of the Internet and Telefonica de Espana SA’s Infovia online service. The computing services division of Indra SA (formerly known as Eritel SA) handled the provisional count in a $8m three-phase project that included capturing, computing and circulating the electoral data and deployed a total of 500 staff . The greatest challenge lay in making the data available to the public networks in real- time. In order to be able to create some 1,500 pages a minute, Indra developed a system based on Sun Microsystems Inc and Silicon Graphics Inc equipment, using standard software and its own tweaks to ensure maximum security and speed. However, such was the interest generated that traffic on the Spanish information highways was slowed to a crawl, with waiting times of up to one hour and a half for those determined and patient enough to gain access to the elections Web site. Javier Sola, director of the Spanish Association of Internet Users, explained that the causes of the traffic jams were twofold: on the one hand, access providers, as a general rule, only have one connection per five users, hence the first bottleneck. Secondly, the type of information transmitted added to the delays, since there was an abundance of diagrams and maps, and the bulk of the documents acted as a brake to the turnaround in connections. Director of Indra’s public administration division Juan Navarro admitted that demand far exceeded our expectations, adding that in less than 24 hours, some 1.7m connections were recorded. All told, it would appear that Spain’s information autopistas could use some extra lanes. รก
