This man knows things that nobody understands.
The day WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram fell, his phone crashed and he was seen giving explanations in the media.
"It had nothing to do with us, but people thought I knew what had happened in the guts of Mark Zuckerberg's servers."
Jorge Román (Madrid, 1980) is an internet plumber.
And there are not many.
Those who were born in Madrid and work in Spanish are only he and his team from Transparent Edge Services, the only European CDN that offers a service equivalent to that of the large American ones.
CDN stands for
content delivery network
. Without them the internet would be an eternal
buffering
(that circle that goes around when the content you are in a hurry to see doesn't quite start).
A CDN is a network of nodes distributed around the world that decongests the internet.
If you, on vacation let's say in Hawaii, want to read a Madrid newspaper, you will be able to do so without difficulty thanks to a server that will send you a copy from the nearest point.
By shortening the distance content must travel, delays are reduced and the download will be instantaneous.
You will not notice it because you think the world has always been like this, but without CDNs we would navigate with infinite parsimony through something similar to what was the prehistory of the internet, when you could smoke a cigarette while waiting for a response from the AltaVista search engine.
Daniel Ochoa de Olza (Daniel Ochoa de Olza)
A CDN was what Jorge set up in 2011 with his partner Fermín Manzanedo. In 2004 they had participated in the first installation of one of these node networks in Spain, and there they learned everything. "What we did was make the CDN that we would have liked to have," he explains. At that time, the world was divided between US companies, with exorbitant prices and no support in Spanish, and
do-it-yourself
CDNs. In 2011 they began to fantasize about settling right in the middle of that road.
"At the beginning it was hard, we were new and we were not Americans," he recalls, and points out that all administrations in Europe depend on US CDNs. “America's technology monopoly must end. Here they fight for privacy, there not so much. Having so much data going through US platforms can cause problems ”. Its clients are media such as El Confidencial, RTVE, TV3, Newtral or El Español. More than 2,000 webs are supported on your CDN, with 47 nodes spread throughout the world.
When he was six years old, the Magi brought him a computer. "It was made of tape, it took three-quarters of an hour to load and it came with a Basic book." "With that manual, I built a phone book that also took half an hour to load." Today humanity loses its form in the face of a lazy internet. "And in today's perception," he says, "that's anything that doesn't charge instantly."
Sitting in front of his computer, he contemplates “the graphs in real time” of the Internet traffic.
Without reading the news, you can guess today from your customers' traffic spikes.
“Suddenly you see a peak and you go to find out what happened.
The bells, the Christmas lottery or the Olympic Games are announced peaks, but the rest surprises you like life itself ”.
Jorge especially remembers the abdication of Juan Carlos I. “El Confidencial had just hired us and, suddenly, the King abdicated.
It was our baptism of fire ”.
