"You cannae break the laws of physics, Captain!"
Seriously, LINX is the obvious first step.
To find a low latency connection from Chicago to Europe? Somehow I think that he should be shopping locally but it might be useful to use the LINX looking-glass to validate what his local vendors tell him about round trip times. Or he could use a looking-glass in Chicago to measure traffic to various European destinations. LINX, London http://www.linx.net/www_public/our_network/network_tools Equinix, Chicago http://lg.broadwing.net/looking/ If I were in his position I would make the rounds of all vendors in Chicago, ask for prices and latency data, then check their latency numbers using various looking-glass sites. If a vendor gives out numbers that vary significantly from what you can measure then I would want a detailed explanation of why that is. --Michael Dillon