With the assumption that you will have a wired backhaul to your HQ over which the retail access-layer devices connect to commerce servers, make sure that the wireless carrier's gateways to their wired network (where the wired backhaul is connected to) are geographically well-dispersed such that wireless access traffic from (for example) suburban Los Angeles destined for a Los Angeles HQ data center, does not traverse the US back to the east coast before it enters the carrier's wired backbone. Surprisingly, some large wireless carriers appear to think that 2 continental traversals for each packet is an acceptable network design. I have experienced round trip latency between sites 50 miles apart measured at 750-1500 milliseconds when using GSM/CDMA wireless as the access layer method. The key is to ask the wireless carrier where the network-to-network interfaces between the wireless and wired backbone networks are located, and moreover, how many interfaces are there. Some large wireless carriers have a single wireless/wired gateway for the entire US! -----Original Message----- From: Leo Woltz [mailto:leo.woltz@gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, September 25, 2010 1:37 PM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Mobile Operator Connectivity I am looking for some guidance from the list. We will soon be deploying wireless payment devices (CDMA/GSM). We are looking at options on where to locate the servers that will run the backend payment gateways; we would like the least amount of latency between the servers and the wireless networks as possible. The wireless networks we will be deploying the devices on are: AT&T Wireless Verizon Wireless Sprint PCS Rogers Wireless Bell Mobility Telus Mobility Vodafone I was thinking we have a few options, to try and peer with the wireless networks directly, buy bandwidth from networks that are directly peered with the wireless operators or the Global Roaming Exchange Peering service that Equinix runs but I have not been able to find out much more then what is on Equinix's public web site. We also have a need to peer with PayPal and Amazon. I welcome the lists comments and recommendations.