Leased line questions

Don't know. Last DS3 cross-country I did from Chicago to a coast was $12,000 month, but that was some time ago.

I wouldn't expect any telco to provide that kind of coverage. If you start dealing directly with the submarine cable companies, they generally cover only certain areas, and only for hand off up to the LEC, which will take in incountry. They'll be some sort of multi-company dealings no matter what for that kind of coverage.

Light travels over fiber signifigantly slower than in a vacuum. Also, remember than when you "ping" something, you are seeing the transmit and return times.

I wouldn't expect a private inter-connect is going to be signifigantly different than the Internet path traffic takes to get to your destination over the public Internet. Afterall, the Internet links are using those same private links that you are planing on using. Internet routers, while adding some slight delay, are going to be insignifigant delays compared to the distances and delays compared to the light propagation around the world. Also, telco doesn't lay long distance runs in perfect direct links. Ie. Coming out of Chicago, the fiber probably heads south down to Kansas City first before heading out West to Seattle before the submarine cable to HK.

My cross-country DS3 link wasn't much different than Internet traffic back in the day, certainly not signifigantly different RTT times.

Thus, I'd do traceroutes from your location out to various places you are planning on going to. While I think I'm hitting Beijing and not HK with ping

from the midwest, I'm getting a RTT of 236ms. Most likely a RTT over private links might get you down into the 210-220ms range.

You would have to have some sort of POP in HK with IP addresses BGP'd out of HK uplinks to the public Internet. If they hit your public IP address range out of Chicago, its going to go over the public Internet to reach you.

Thus, your private network will have to have interconnects at each public location you want to servce, buying Net bandwidth from that location at whatever rate...

Not to sound presumptuous, but what would be the downfall of having a dedicated high-speed connection out of Chicago and setting up site-to- site VPN's with your customers in Hong Kong and the other places? If the remote locations have centralized services then their customers in turn would connect to them, hit the site-to-site VPN tunnel and get to Chicago...

Yes, that is what I will have to do if general service over the Internet is not good enough (but it may be).

(Thanks, Doug, for your post!)