Metagyre, Inc.

Speed on the Internet is a measure of distance divided by time and is termed latency.  “Bigger pipes” or more bandwidth, increases throughput but cannot reduce latency.  Consider the example of air travel.

Is a Boeing 747 three times “faster” than a Boeing 737?  They both cruise at around 500 miles per hour. The difference is that the 747 carries 500 passengers where as the 737 only carries 150. The Boeing 747 is three times bigger (more bandwidth) than the Boeing 737, not faster.  And like an airplane, as long as you have fewer files (passengers) than the network can carry at any one time, increasing the bandwidth will not reduce presentation times.

From a physical perspective, in order to increase the speed at which web pages or other data are presented to customers on the Internet you need to reduce the distance.  There are two strategies to reduce distance.  Regional Data Center (RDC) or Content Delivery Network  (CDN) strategies both reduce the distance data travels to customers.

In this discussion we will look at the effects of an RDC architecture for reducing the time it takes data to reach customers. With an RDC strategy, you have multiple data centers strategically placed around the globe to service those areas closest to the RDC.  For this analysis we simulated an RDC in Seattle, London and Hong Kong.

In order to expose the base Internet latency a test was run sending one packet of data over the Internet and measuring its round trip time.  This is referred to as a ping test.  As you can see the following chart shows latency increasing over distance from Seattle.

By moving the data and servers closer to the customer and establishing a regional presence, delivery times experienced by the total customer base becomes more consistent regardless of their location.  In order to simulate an RDC presence the ping test was repeated with Asia Pacific locations measuring latency times to Hong Kong and European locations measuring latency to London.  The chart below shows the results of that RDC simulated ping test.  The distances and the latency are from the initiating location to the simulated RDC.  There was a 65% improvement in the average response time utilizing the RDC model.

Conclusion:
While big network pipes will push more data out the door, it will not deliver it to Internet customers faster.  In order to reduce latency, move your data and presentation services closer to your customers.  Depending on systems, significant reduction in latency can be achieved through the strategic use of regional data centers.

The tests run for this analysis accurately assess latency with for simple data requests.  This investigation does not represent a specific customer experience and results will vary depending on variables such as time of day, network provider and other public network activity.