Packet size of your pings may have something to do with it, but assuming you are pinging with the same size packet across the board, the data should be reliable. If you are using unix boxes your pings will have a different level of resolution than say from a windows box. One test that should be reasonably conclusive is the following. The hop that is 22ms and 7 hops away from your upstream should ping you on the other side of the new T3. If it approaches 42 ms, you have a 20ms T3. Is it ATM? Your upstream could be running on a congested ATM cloud. If the latency drops in the wee hours of the morning, even for a few minutes, its congestion (which is obvious). I have a 27 mile (measured by air or telco :) ) DS3 that even under 30mb/s load pings minimum 1 ms average 1-2 ms. (cisco<->cisco). At 1400 bytes the average goes to 3ms. Your upstream may be putting you on a channelized interface on a router that has a very busy VIP (if its a cisco). Or is running you through a lot of electronics on the way. The point here is that any kind of aggregation he is doing could eat up 10-20ms, by design or oversubscription. Bigger providers are more likely to aggregate DS3s into bigger access methods whereas small providers usually don't have the operational necessity. Deepak Jain AiNET On Sat, 17 Feb 2001, Nipper, Arnold wrote:
Chuck,
should read 130mi/msec I guess. Which would end up with ~7msec per 1000miles.
Arnold
----- Original Message ----- From: "Charles Scott" <cscott@gaslightmedia.com> To: "Matthew F. Ringel" <ringel@akamai.com> Cc: <nanog@merit.edu> Sent: Saturday, February 17, 2001 3:33 PM Subject: Re: T3 Latency
Matthew: Appears to be a typo in your final number of 130 mi/sec, but I get where you're going with this. I'm just having a problem trying to figure out how I end up with a couple thousand fiber miles from Northern Michigan to Chicago. Should be interesting to sort this one out.
Thanks,
Chuck
On Sat, 17 Feb 2001, Matthew F. Ringel wrote:
The rule of thumb I use is that the speed of light in fiber-optic cable
is
roughly 2x10^8 m/sec.
2x10^8 m/sec = 200,000,000 m/sec = 200,000 km/sec = 200 km/msec =~ 130 mi/sec
I once worked with a customer whose first hop out was ~30ms, regardless of the load on the line (a t3, iirc). Sure enough, he was on a very large SONET ring that travelled the north-south length of the US roughly twice before his traffic went elsewhere.
......Matthew