Importance of Low Latency Internet Connection

I received a call today from a Vancouver Systems Integrator, one of our value-added partners. The customer, whose main office was in Victoria, also had branch locations in Toronto and Vancouver. They also had some of their critical applications hosted on servers located in a Vancouver Co-location facility.

The problem was in their Toronto office, where users could barely use their applications that were hosted here in BC. It turns out their ADSL service from the local Telco had very high latency, which caused lost packets, which in turn caused their VPN to often become unavailable. For those users that are simply using the Internet to browse and for email, latency is not a factor. But for businesses that are connecting remote users through a VPN or with applications like Terminal Services, then latency is very important.

Voice over IP is another application that requires low latency and good networking, instead of simply more bandwidth. And as it turned out, adding VoIP was in their plans for later this year.

Skyway West’s fix was our T1 Xstream service, that had the option of a dedicated connection between their Ontario office and B.C. With this configuration regular web traffic hit the Internet through our “POP” in Toronto, but traffic bound for any of their 2 offices or to their servers in their Co-location facility connected via the dedicated circuit. The result was extremely low latency, and more than double their Upstream connection.

For information on our T1 Xstream service, our Full-Duplex Fibre or business ADSL feel free to contact us anytime.

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Chris Miles | cmiles@skywaywest.com | 604 484 5257