Mobile Operator Connectivity

Tue Sep 28 01:41:39 UTC 2010

Some large telcos with wireless and wireline operations in the US
maintain 2 separate backbones: one that I call "wired", that corresponds
to traditional wired access where commerce servers are usually located;
and one that I call a "wireless" backbone, where GSM/CDMA wireless
devices are used to aggregate access-layer traffic. Both backbones
consist of national fiber-optic, BGP-based networks. Surprisingly, some
large telcos have a presence of both wireline and wireless backbones in
the same colos, but the 2 backbone networks are interconnected, not in
that colo, but at a single geographic location (with perhaps a single
hot standby interconnection site), located, for example in northern
Virginia.

So, the worst case is that if the servers and GSM/CDMA devices are
located in Southern California, even though the telco has a wireline and
wireless presence in the local LA colo, GSM/CDMA access-layer traffic
must traverse the continental US to northern Virginia and back to get to
the server.    

-----Original Message-----
From: Seth Mattinen [mailto:sethm at rollernet.us] 
Sent: Monday, September 27, 2010 1:14 PM
To: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Re: Mobile Operator Connectivity

On 9/25/2010 13:37, Leo Woltz wrote:
> 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:
> 

> 
> Sprint PCS
> 

For Sprint you can get a circuit to AS1239 and just take customer
routes. Their PCS network is AS10507, but as far as I know the closest
you can get to it is 1239.

~Seth