I am doing some work on a network in central Illinois that is currently peering with Sprint and McLeod. They have a number of customers in the U.K. and they want to reduce latency to that part of the world. They've been offered a point to point 100 mbit link between their facility and a location in London from Cogent, but this isn't IP service. They've asked me to sort out how they can use this link or to find a good alternative for them.
A long time ago I think Teleglobe peering would have been the snap answer for European connectivity, but its been a few years. Who would I look to in terms of a carrier on that side of the pond? We've got on net termination with Sprint as a starting point for a link ...
Hi,
few strong links in Europe and specially UK are: COGENT, LEVEL3, C&W,TELEFONICA
COGENT "win" most of our US links to Europe even better than LEVEL3,
but i would not be surprise if LEVEL3 win most of the links to the UK.
for sprintlink, from Caribbean C&W goes to sprintlink Miami and from
there to telefnoica even though there's a path through cogent/LEVEL3.
in terms of connectivity inside telefonica i am not happy with, alot
of latency for too many places, and alot of failures around Spain(i
assume telefonica is spanish)
C&W is very strong in UK, as well as LEVEL3 and cogent. but this is
not enough to come to any conclusion, so i would start by analyzing ip
scopes where most of the European clients are connecting from and run
some BGP queries and traces.
and checking up sprintlink peering to differenet london locations.
hope it's not too vague and it gives you anything useful,
No, this is very helpful. We just turned up AdventNet's Net Flow Analyzer for this customer's two production cisco 7507s and we should be able to see where the European customers are very shortly. It is good to know that Cogent is a decent choice for this job - we've seen not so positive stuff about them here in the past. If we can narrow things down to Cogent and Level 3 right away that is a good place to start. Someone sent me to peeringdb.com and it looks like I have plenty of places to choose from in London.
You can check out LINX out of the UK. Its is a decent public exchange point out of the UK and currently has the most participants out of all other peering points in the UK.
You could also try www.peeringdb.com – a great resource for peering data from a global standpoint.
I am doing some work on a network in central Illinois that is
currently peering with Sprint and McLeod. They have a number of
customers in the U.K. and they want to reduce latency to that part of
the world.
Make sure they're not trying to reduce latency below
the speed of light in fibre. Make sure that your client
understands that they will never achieve the same latencies
trans-Atlantic as they achieve within the state. We recently
had to haul back one of our over-eager account managers
who was trying to sell a low-latency solution that was
about 3 times faster than the speed of light in fibre.
BTW, the speed of light in fibre is roughly equal to
the speed of electrons in copper and roughly equal to
two-thirds the speed of light in a vacuum. You just
can't move information faster than about 200,000 km/hr.
BTW, the speed of light in fibre is roughly equal to
the speed of electrons in copper and roughly equal to
two-thirds the speed of light in a vacuum. You just
can't move information faster than about 200,000 km/hr.
Slow day at work, Michael? In my universe light in glass moves about
3600 times as fast.
Get ip-transit from a provider that is peering with tier2s in the uk.
I'm seeing problems with tier1s again and again: they have a great global
network but they won't reach most of the end users on a direct way since
they are only peering with other tier1s. The route will always go trough a
tier1 then a tier1's customer and then to the destination which is rather
indirect. Tier2 usually have better connectivity and are exchanging traffic
with other tier2s on more places than just one per country as tier1s are
usually doing.
Peering at linx might also be a good idea but don't forget that only a few
networks are going to peer with you if you are a small player...
The best mix one can get for ip-transit always is a combination of tier1s
and in addition to them tier2s who are serving the geographic region where
your targets (mostly eyeballs I guess) are.
Good tier2s in Europe are Lambdanet and Telia* for example. Telia is selling
transit services in the US as far as I know so this might be the best
option.
Gunther
* = Telia is something between a tier1 and a tier2 if you ask me. Okay they
are buying transit from spring or something like that but what I'm aiming at
is that they are peering with most European end user networks.
To find a low latency connection from Chicago to Europe?
Somehow I think that he should be shopping locally but
it might be useful to use the LINX looking-glass
to validate what his local vendors tell him about
round trip times. Or he could use a looking-glass
in Chicago to measure traffic to various European
destinations.
If I were in his position I would make the rounds of
all vendors in Chicago, ask for prices and latency data,
then check their latency numbers using various
looking-glass sites. If a vendor gives out numbers that
vary significantly from what you can measure then I
would want a detailed explanation of why that is.
