On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 11:17 AM, Matthew Palmer <mpalmer@hezmatt.org> wrote:

On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 06:33:07PM +0100, Robert Lusby wrote:

...

Looking at hosting some servers in Hong Kong, to serve the APAC region. Our client is worried that this may slow things down in their Australia region, and are wondering whether hosting the servers in an Australian data-centre would be a better option.

Does anyone have any statistics on this?

No formal statistics, just a lot of experience.  You may be unsurprised to learn that serving into Australia from outside Australia is slower than serving from within Australia.  That being said, there's a fair bit less distance for the light to travel from Hong Kong or anywhere in the region than from the US.

Given that the bulk of the population density in Australia is on the eastern coast near Sydney, and the *only* fiber path going anywhere near Asia from Sydney does so via Guam, the light path traveled from Sydney to Guam to La Union (PH) to Hong Kong isn't appreciably shorter than the light path from Sydney to Hawaii to the US--which is covered by roughly 6x as many fiber runs as the Guam pathway, and is thus somewhat cheaper to get onto--you might as well host on the west coast of the US as in Hong Kong. (and *that* was a horrific run-on sentence!) If I look at average data for the past five years between Sydney and Hong Kong, San Jose, Singapore, and Los Angeles, on average it's better to serve Sydney from Los Angeles than Hong Kong or Singapore: mpetach@netops:/home/mrtg/public_html/performance> ~/tmp/avgperf.pl AUE HKI total daily data files read: 1559 AUE to HKI latency (min/avg/max): 134.216/173.273/1052.158 mpetach@netops:/home/mrtg/public_html/performance> ~/tmp/avgperf.pl AUE SJC total daily data files read: 1558 AUE to SJC latency (min/avg/max): 149.829/176.674/308.637 mpetach@netops:/home/mrtg/public_html/performance> ~/tmp/avgperf.pl AUE SG1 total daily data files read: 1558 AUE to SG1 latency (min/avg/max): 101.871/204.485/999 mpetach@netops:/home/mrtg/public_html/performance> ~/tmp/avgperf.pl AUE LAX total daily data files read: 931 AUE to LAX latency (min/avg/max): 157.603/166.720/999 mpetach@netops:/home/mrtg/public_html/performance>

That is predicated on having good direct links, which is eye-wateringly expensive if you're used to US data costs (data going from China to Australia via San Jose...  aaargh).  Then again, hosting within Australia is similarly expensive, so splitting your presence isn't going to help you any from a cost PoV.

It's not really a matter of eye-wateringly expensive, so much as simple basic existence; there's no direct Sydney to southern Asia fiber, at the moment; the best you can do is hop through Papua New Guinea to Guam, and then back across into southern Asia. (or overshoot up to Japan, and then bounce your way back down from there). Matt

On 03/04/2011, at 8:42 AM, Franck Martin wrote: Also remember, you would be serving Australia only from Australia. if I'm not mistaken, the Australia backbone is more or less volume based cahrged... AARNET is the Academic and Research Network, it's not "THE" backbone. (Note: in previous incarnations many years ago it was). Australia is an island, approximately the same size as continental USA but with only about 22M people. It's not really on the way anywhere, so the submarine capacity is pretty much limited to what is needed to serve Australia. There exist various submarine cables which go North to Guam and beyond (AJC/PPC1) and East from Sydney (SCCN, Endeavour) as well as SMW3 from Perth to Singapore. SMW3 is a great path into Singapore, except it's old and capacity is limited. Another cable is meant to being built on that path - many people have tried, let's hope the next attempt will work. Connecting these we have really only four sets of land based networks (Telstra, Optus, AAPT, NextGen - not all of these have complete coverage and/or rely on others for redundancy). We're very like Canada in some ways - small population along and edge (Canada is the US border, we're along the Southern and Eastern coasts). Various providers have capacity on different sets of cables. It's difficult to generalise as, for instance, some providers use the cable into Asia to provide business customers with good connectivity but don't generalise that to residential customers. The kinds of connectivity at the end of those cables varies as well. If you want to get content into Australia then generally to get the best delivery: a) Put it on the West Coast of the USA - LA or San Jose - everyone has good connectivity to those places. Look for places you can easily get content into AS4637, AS7473/7474, AS4826 and AS4739. AS4648 for NZ and some of AU as well. (AS4739 will peer with you there :-) (*) b) Deliver it domestically in Australia in Sydney. Equinix Sydney is a good place to start. You can get domestic transit as well as good peering to most providers. It's also close to the large population centres on the East Coast (SYD, MEL). c) Failing that - try Japan first, then Hong Kong then Singapore. But you will need to combine with a) or b) to give good connectivity to all providers. Consider various acceleration things like CDNs - especially LLNW, AKAM and EdgeCast who all have delivery capability in AU already. If anyone has any specific AU questions then I'm happy to try and answer off list. (I work for AS4739 and am responsible for peering and transit so have reasonable interest in delivery of content to customers in AU - we're keen to have GOOD connectivity). (*) AS4637 has AS1221 behind it, AS7473 has AS7474 (their customers are in AS4804) - they have around 50% of the market together in terms of traffic delivered to the AU market. Tools like peeringdb.com<http://peeringdb.com> and bgp.he.net<http://bgp.he.net> will tell you how everyone's connected. MMC -- Matthew Moyle-Croft Peering Manager and Team Lead - Commercial and DSLAMs Internode /Agile Level 5, 150 Grenfell Street, Adelaide, SA 5000 Australia Email: mmc@internode.com.au<mailto:mmc@internode.com.au> Web: http://www.on.net<http://www.on.net/>