Leased line questions
Greg J.
Hi, I am trying to update my business plan for a company I will be
starting with better information than "that sounds good." Can anyone
answer any of these questions?
#1 What are ballpark monthly costs $USD for a high quality 43 megabit/
s leased private line between Chicago and Hong Kong through reputable
telcos?
#2 If I establish a private line network including Chicago, San
Francisco, Hong Kong, London, Berlin, Rio De Janeiro, Tokyo, and
Bangladore, what is the approximate minimum number of reputable telcos
I am going to have to deal with? In other words, to what degree do
"global telcos" provide global coverage?
#3 Data traveling at the speed of light (by my calculations) would
take about 42ms to travel from Chicago to Hong Kong. What is a
realistic estimate of how long it would take a packet to travel that
route over my leased private line? (I can't imagine how much equipment
my packet passes through, or how much delay each piece of equipment
adds.) Presumably it is going to be a lot faster than over the
Internet.
#4 Suppose I have a customer in Hong Kong who is connected to a
generic ISP. He is using my custom software on his PC to talk to my
server in Chicago. Am I correct in assuming that it is impossible to
make the Internet route his packets through my leased private line
(which I would like to only allow traffic for my customers), because I
have no control over the routers his packets will pass through?
Thanks!
Greg
Doug McIntyre
>Hi, I am trying to update my business plan for a company I will be
>starting with better information than "that sounds good." Can anyone
>answer any of these questions?
>#1 What are ballpark monthly costs $USD for a high quality 43 megabit/
>s leased private line between Chicago and Hong Kong through reputable
>telcos?
Don't know. Last DS3 cross-country I did from Chicago to a coast was
$12,000 month, but that was some time ago.
>#2 If I establish a private line network including Chicago, San
>Francisco, Hong Kong, London, Berlin, Rio De Janeiro, Tokyo, and
>Bangladore, what is the approximate minimum number of reputable telcos
>I am going to have to deal with? In other words, to what degree do
>"global telcos" provide global coverage?
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.
>#3 Data traveling at the speed of light (by my calculations) would
>take about 42ms to travel from Chicago to Hong Kong. What is a
>realistic estimate of how long it would take a packet to travel that
>route over my leased private line? (I can't imagine how much equipment
>my packet passes through, or how much delay each piece of equipment
>adds.) Presumably it is going to be a lot faster than over the
>Internet.
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 www.xinhua.cn, 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.
>#4 Suppose I have a customer in Hong Kong who is connected to a
>generic ISP. He is using my custom software on his PC to talk to my
>server in Chicago. Am I correct in assuming that it is impossible to
>make the Internet route his packets through my leased private line
>(which I would like to only allow traffic for my customers), because I
>have no control over the routers his packets will pass through?
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...
gregarican
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...
Greg J.
>
> - Show quoted text -
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!)