Of course, no matter how much you outsource, you will still need reliable direct Internet access for critical traffic, such as e-mail, originating within your organization. There's no way around this.
As Good as It Gets
We all strive for perfection, but there's a limit to how much you can improve the performance of even the best ISP. The laws of physics add a certain amount of latency--if you do the math, you'll see that the speed of light will add round-trip latency of more than 30 milliseconds between the East and West Coasts. Some ISP network designs are such that your data could travel close to that distance just to get to a neighbor who uses a different ISP, and it becomes an even greater factor when dealing with international connections that span oceans. Every router hop, and every router that has to deal with queued-up packets, adds yet more latency. Still, when your business depends on reliable access, you need not let "best effort" be the last word.
Peter Morrissey is a full-time faculty member of Syracuse University's School of Information Studies, and a contributing editor and columnist for Network Computing. Write to him at [email protected].
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The Internet's beauty is its resiliency--thanks to its military roots, the network was designed so that messages can be routed and rerouted in multiple directions, thus ensuring it can function even if parts are down or destroyed. That's the upside for those enterprises that depend on it for critical communications. But there's a dark side as well--for example, no centralized management--and problems do happen. Sometimes these are just blips, causing a couple of lost packets or a few extra milliseconds downloading a page. Sometimes, though, blip doesn't nearly cover it. For example, in January the SQL Slammer worm did a number on a big portion of the Internet, causing serious packet loss and completely saturating some circuits. Many ISPs--and, by extension, their customers--felt the pain.
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Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
