Mobile Operator Connectivity

Holmes,David A dholmes at mwdh2o.com
Mon Sep 27 17:07:37 UTC 2010


With the assumption that you will have a wired backhaul to your HQ over
which the retail access-layer devices connect to commerce servers, make
sure that the wireless carrier's gateways to their wired network (where
the wired backhaul is connected to) are geographically well-dispersed
such that wireless access traffic from (for example) suburban Los
Angeles destined for a Los Angeles HQ data center, does not traverse the
US back to the east coast before it enters the carrier's wired backbone.
Surprisingly, some large wireless carriers appear to think that 2
continental traversals for each packet is an acceptable network design.
I have experienced round trip latency between sites 50 miles apart
measured at 750-1500 milliseconds when using GSM/CDMA wireless as the
access layer method. 

The key is to ask the wireless carrier where the network-to-network
interfaces between the wireless and wired backbone networks are located,
and moreover, how many interfaces are there. Some large wireless
carriers have a single wireless/wired gateway for the entire US!

-----Original Message-----
From: Leo Woltz [mailto:leo.woltz at gmail.com] 
Sent: Saturday, September 25, 2010 1:37 PM
To: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Mobile Operator Connectivity

I am looking for some guidance from the list.  We will soon be deploying
wireless payment devices (CDMA/GSM).  We are looking at options on where
to
locate the servers that will run the backend payment gateways; we would
like
the least amount of latency between the servers and the wireless
networks as
possible.  The wireless networks we will be deploying the devices on
are:



AT&T Wireless

Verizon Wireless

Sprint PCS

Rogers Wireless

Bell Mobility

Telus Mobility

Vodafone



I was thinking we have a few options, to try and peer with the wireless
networks directly, buy bandwidth from networks that are directly peered
with
the wireless operators or the Global Roaming Exchange Peering service
that
Equinix runs but I have not been able to find out much more then what is
on
Equinix's public web site.   We also have a need to peer with PayPal and
Amazon.  I welcome the lists comments and recommendations.




More information about the NANOG mailing list