U.S./Europe connectivity

Wed Dec 6 10:56:30 UTC 2006

>      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.

--Michael Dillon