STRIKING A BALANCE
As traffic levels to Pacific Sunwear's self-hosted Web site grew, so did the shortcomings of its Internet access circuits. Yes, more traffic meant increased sales, but it also meant the company had to repeatedly increase the bandwidth it leased from AT&T to connect its site to the Internet.
Pacific Sunwear started with a pair of 1.45Mbit/sec T1 circuits in 2000, but had to ramp up to three T1 lines in 2001, adding a fourth one a half year later. When the company moved into a new data center in February 2002, it also upgraded to a single fractional T3 (10Mbit/sec) Private Virtual Circuit (PVC), delivered via microwave between Pacific Sunwear's data center and AT&T's central office.
As traffic continued to grow, Pacific Sunwear added yet another 10Mbit/sec fractional T3 PVC a few months later. This one, as noted, was a terrestrial circuit backhauled to Washington, D.C., in an effort to improve Web site performance for its East Coast shoppers. With AOL located across the river from the company's East Coast POP in Washington, the users of the nation's largest ISP got "terrific" performance coming into Pacific Sunwear's site, says Russell.
"We found that in every case when we added bandwidth, we saw a corresponding improvement in Web sales," he says. "As the end-user experience improved, sales went up with it. Our e-commerce people let us know they were extremely pleased."
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