In 2015 XS4ALL released a short film titled ‘The Attachment, a digital road movie’. I still think it is the best thing a Dutch internet provider ever put online. The film was launched to mark their new (English) slogan: First Class Internet.

The Attachment, a digital road movie by XS4ALL (2015).

The road an email takes

The premise is simple. A man in Amsterdam has to send an important attachment. Instead of pressing send, he prints it, wraps it in brown paper and delivers it by hand, following the exact route the email would have taken through the network.

A counter in the corner keeps track: 5 kilometers and 0.060 seconds to the XS4ALL data center, 12 kilometers and 0.110 seconds to the internet exchange. He walks past a system administrator in a server room and a chief field engineer in a manhole. He stands on a beach where a transatlantic cable enters the sea. In New York a data center manager explains that the building has generators with access to 300,000 liters of diesel. Then Texas, a campfire, and the envelope changes hands: 9,915 kilometers, 0.728 seconds.

That counter is the whole film. The journey takes him days. The email would have taken less than a second. Everything he passes on the way, the cables, the data centers, the diesel and the people who guard them day and night, exists for one purpose: that nobody has to wait. An enormous amount has to go right, but the sender sees none of it. He presses send and it works. That is what XS4ALL meant by ‘First Class Internet’.

Minimal complexity, maximum control

I recognize that story, because it is mine too. A website is the same thing. The visitor sees a page that appears instantly. Behind it are servers, DNS, certificates, caches, backups, monitoring and a deploy pipeline. I do two things with that complexity. I remove as much of it as I can: no frameworks, no database, no plugins, just static files. And what remains, I control myself: my own servers, my own CMS, my own monitoring, my own failover. The result is a website that always works and you never have to wait for.

XS4ALL is gone. KPN retired the brand at the end of 2021. I am more than happy to take over their slogan. ‘First Class Internet’… sounds perfect.

()  Joost van der Schee