How Reliable is the Trans-Atlantic Link? 11
bdamm asks: "We are looking at doing a Web application that will be rolled out internationally. Currently we are looking at the feasibility of centralising our application, or building a larger system that can allows for multiple hubs separated by slow connections, such as the Trans-Atlantic link. My question is, does anyone know just how good the Trans-Atlantic link and other major non-U.S. backbones are? Is it fast enough to allow everything to be in one place, or just good enough to have HTML generation occur centrally with satellite image servers?"
"The" Transatlantic Link? (Score:1)
To get back to your question though, a lot depends on the ISPs involved. As another poster noted, the peering relationships in the UK are poor and in a lot of cases, traffic will bounce over to the US and then return to the UK over a different pipe. (Kind of like how some requests across town go through California
Re:Something interesting about European access... (Score:1)
Re:"The" Transatlantic Link (Score:1)
Re:"The" Transatlantic Link (Score:1)
For example, the UK Academic Network (Janet) is linked to the US using Teleglobe with two (maybe three?) separate fibres. If they go down then we are, in principle, sunk since there are no peering arrangements with other networks.
How ironic that routing problems at teleglobe have left most of the US unavialable from Janet for most of this week :-)
Purchasing connectivity from multiple networks would certainly be the way to go, if 100% uptime is an absolute must. If 99.99% uptime and compensation will do, you might be OK with one.
Ps: I have no idea what I am talking about here, ignore me
Re:"The" Transatlantic Link (Score:2)
Every year sees at least one more fibre project being laid down between north america and northern europe. The most recent added 2.56Gbps, the next few years should see 20 to 50 times that capacity. If you ever get to see a map of all the lines resting on the bottom of the atlantic, it is truly impressive. I haven't seen a truly acurate map published, the acurate maps are a closely guarded secret shared between all the cable layers.
For a distributed project, especially if you truly want to serve us Europeans, is a very good idea. But don't count on just getting any internet connection in europe and hoping to have any kind of response time from late afternoon until midnight. The links hauling internet traffic get saturated as everyone gets home and starts surfing for that fine american pr0n
If the project is truly as important to your company's revenue, then lease a dedicated chunk of bandwidth from europe to your main servers. It will be worth every bit you pay for it to haul your HTML to the european servers, and then have it served up over local internet connections.
the AC
Re:Something interesting about European access... (Score:2)
IIRC the DFN has 90 MBIT to the german ISP-exchange point DE-CIX, but a 4x 155 Mbps + 2 x 44Mbps + 1 x 60Mbps transatlantic link.
That leads to strange situations, that slashdots loads MUCH faster than my own site at a german ISP
Even download transfer rates are MUCH faster. I get about 200-250 k/sec to redhat.com, but only about 50 k/sec to other german providers
No need to say, that this really really sucks
Samba Information HQ
Qwest communications (Score:2)
"The" Transatlantic Link (Score:2)
For example, the UK Academic Network (Janet) is linked to the US using Teleglobe with two (maybe three?) separate fibres. If they go down then we are, in principle, sunk since there are no peering arrangements with other networks. (I think the situation may have changed recently but the point is the same: there is no "One True Fibre" - just lots of networks and you can pay for your traffic to go down any one of them)
So, if you need a reliable trans-atlantic connection, I would think you should just go with a supplier who has multiple redundant links or purchase connectivity on separate networks.
Depends (Score:3)
I live in Minneapolis From work my connection to most well connected sites in sweden is better then my connection to any site outside of the Minneapolis area. (My company might have a leased line to Sweden for internal use - I don't know our internal topography)
One of the tenets of IP is you don't know the path a packet takes. It normally happens that successive packets take the same route, but there is nothing innheirant in IP that says they have to. (routing protocols are just a lot easier to design when they send them the same way) It used to happen that packets that only physically need to go 70 miles, from the UK to France would travel over a thousand, through the US. This may or may not have changed.
You can be sure that the optimal routing will change in the future. If you build a big data center anywhere don't be surprized if someone else provides cheaper bandwidth, and everyone switches to them but you are left hanging dry in a physically bad location for that cheaper serivce.
Network Topology & stuff. (Score:3)
wcom / uunet and most of the other telco's (level 3, colt...) operate large ring networks, with similar capacity (or greater) than the transatlantic capacity, these networks typically pass through the central business hubs of the eu (london, berlin, frankfurt, amsterdam & paris). They also tend to have connections over to stockholm, barcelona, milan, roma etc.
peering arrangements are typically made at internet exchanges, for example Linx. All of the major players peer here (often not with each other...
due to economics, transatlantic bandwidth tends to be cheaper than european, although this *is* changing, level 3 for instance charges less if traffic is just going across europe - probably to encourage take up of capacity.
finally, the uk is not the only drop off point in europe, i think there are similar connections in place in sweden, holland, germany & france.
if you want hard figures and network maps, suggest you look at:
www.uu.net
www.level3.com
www.colt.com
and also track down the various internet exchanges at key points around europe.
I know less about asia pac, connectivity tends to come in to hong kong, australia and japan, and i think those countries are directly connected to each other.
1 point to note, in many countries you will have to build datacentres locally / have some kind of operations in place. It's a legal not technical requirement. We're based in the uk, but when we launch in germany we'll have to deploy a seperate datacentre there.
Something interesting about European access... (Score:4)
Ok, I don't have independent verification of this, but from my talks with several of the big bandwidth providers, and others, there is an interesting problem about providing access for European consumers....
Logically, it would seem to make sense to open a UK (or German, or French) farm to serve EC people, but it turns out this isn't necessarily the case.
The problem seems to be the peering arrangements in the EC are bad-to-non-existant. As far as response time goes, this seems to be the priority of EC network providers:
I've heard that the last is considerably below the other two. So the predicament becomes that opening a datacenter in the EC really only buys you better connectivity to people who are directly connected to that datacenter. Oops.
What alot of people have recommended to me is this: Open a datacenter first on the US West coast, then on the US East Coast. The Westie will serve Asia and most of the US, while the Eastie will cover the Eastern seaboard and the E.C. Only after you've done that should you look at putting a datacenter into the E.C., and then consider which PROVIDER (not which Country) has the most demand on it.
Stuff is funky, isn't it?
-Erik