Lipstick on a Pig
There are a bunch of guys running around Australia preaching the benefits of WAN optimization and Network Acceleration. Not to take anything away from optimizing things, but the raw product you begin often matters more than optimizing it. That is to say, if you start with a pig, at best you will end up with a fully optimized, fully accelerated - pig.
I’ll give you an example. We have a customer, who put a small office into Japan, about 20 people. They’ve been using a ‘business grade’ DSL based internet connection from a local ISP that’s 4 megabit and has given them good service and few problems. Japan, being light years ahead of the Australian NBN, have fibre in their office.
Problems began with a string of complaints from the Japanese office that applications are unusable and RDP unreliable. That’s when they rang us, asking if we had any ideas and about WAN optimization and acceleration, which everyone they talk to recommends.
Now, when I’m talking about international data, I find it useful to think in terms of general transport. There are transport companies who provide short trips; the taxi to the airport. There are transport companies who provide medium trips; a train, a rental car or an airplane between Sydney and Melbourne. Then there are transport companies who fly from Sydney to Tokyo.
Just because your local ISP has provided reasonable services between, home - airport - sydney - melbourne doesn’t mean they fly to Tokyo every day. It’s a mistake to think of the internet as an amorphous blob, especially if you have a specific route you need to travel. In the real world, Korean Airlines simply don’t fly to Vanuatu and they don’t try to sell you a ticket. In the internet world, that’s not the case. Your local ISP ports you in a one stop shop agreement to take you wherever you want to go.
And there’s the rub.
There is a 620 gigabit fibre optic cable running between Australia and New Zealand. It’s part of a loop that runs through Hawaii and Fiji to California and back to Brookvale in Sydney then across the ditch. It’s called the Southern Cross cable. So if you had a branch office in New Zealand guess how your data would get there. This cable is owned 50% by NZ Telecom, 40% Singtel and 10% Verizon. Notice who isn’t on the list - Telstra.
It doesn’t take rocket science to work out that when data presents itself to the Southern Cross Cable, from Telstra, Optus (owned by Singtel) or Verizon - guess whose comes last?
Back with our customer, simple pings are taking a 258ms average over the current route. So what nice big cable exists direct from Australia to Japan? As chance would have it a 240 gigabit cable exists, running through Guam, cleverly named the Australia-Japan cable. It’s jointly owned by Telstra, British Telecom, Verizon and Softbank. Looking at the customers traceroutes revealed the backhaul provider is Optus (aka. Singtel) who don’t own any portion of that cable. Sure they could rent some for you, but why would they? They have their own routes to Japan, sadly for our customer, via Singapore or Hong Kong.
WebSecure has had Verizon as an ISP for some years and ping testing to the same customers Japan office takes 121ms average. Less than half the time.
Pipes matter. And with ping, traceroute and Wikipedia you can make decisions that will give your network good bones. Bones that are worth optimizing. That said, if you have beautiful bones talk to us about Exinda.
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