How Reliable is the Trans-Atlantic Link?

bdamm asks: "We are looking at doing a Web application that will be rolled out internationally. Currently we are looking at the feasibility of centralising our application, or building a larger system that can allows for multiple hubs separated by slow connections, such as the Trans-Atlantic link. My question is, does anyone know just how good the Trans-Atlantic link and other major non-U.S. backbones are? Is it fast enough to allow everything to be in one place, or just good enough to have HTML generation occur centrally with satellite image servers?"

Comments

Something interesting about European access...

[trims]

Ok, I don't have independent verification of this, but from my talks with several of the big bandwidth providers, and others, there is an interesting problem about providing access for European consumers....

Logically, it would seem to make sense to open a UK (or German, or French) farm to serve EC people, but it turns out this isn't necessarily the case.

The problem seems to be the peering arrangements in the EC are bad-to-non-existant. As far as response time goes, this seems to be the priority of EC network providers:

1. traffic to their own customers
2. traffic back to the US backbone folks
3. traffic to other providers in the EC.

I've heard that the last is considerably below the other two. So the predicament becomes that opening a datacenter in the EC really only buys you better connectivity to people who are directly connected to that datacenter. Oops.

What alot of people have recommended to me is this: Open a datacenter first on the US West coast, then on the US East Coast. The Westie will serve Asia and most of the US, while the Eastie will cover the Eastern seaboard and the E.C. Only after you've done that should you look at putting a datacenter into the E.C., and then consider which PROVIDER (not which Country) has the most demand on it.

Stuff is funky, isn't it?

-Erik