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Latency Zones
Hi all,
For my new project, I was wondering how you would define the zones around the world from where you would like to know the latency to your server.
I was thinking about:
- East North America
- West North America
- South America
- East Europe
- West Europe
- North Asia (Russia)
- South West Asia
- South East Asia
- East Asia (South Korea, Japan)
- Australia
- Africa
- Greenland
Should I define them more/less detailed ?
Comments
Why not lay them out as you have done in that post?
Or did you want to bundle them?
America
East North America
West North America
South America
Europe
East Europe
West Europe
Asia
North Asia (Russia)
South West Asia
South East Asia
East Asia (South Korea, Japan)
Africa
Africa
^ just one?
Atlantic
Australia
Greenland
Greenland is fairly useless. Africa needs at least 2 locations (most likely, due to pricing, South Africa and Morocco, best case also Egypt).
You also miss the middle east - Again due to pricing the only viable options there are Israel and Saudi Arabia (UAE/Gulf is very expensive, Saudi is cheap as the state telco owns a large cable system to Europe/Asia and local)
Re Africa, I suggest: (1) South Africa, (2) Kenya or Tanzania or Uganda or Rwanda, (3) Nigeria, (4) Egypt, (5) Morocco - in that order.
central europe, east coast, west coast, singapore, sydney
I feel that is about as relevant as it gets. Who has customers/visitors in/from Greenland, Africa, central Asia/eastern Russia?
Thanks for your feedbacks.
Yup, Africa can definitively be divided North/South and Middle East is missing.
The goal is to cover all parts of the world where servers are available so that no matter the place of the server, it can fall into one of the zones.
@aglodek: Any reason for such specific layout? Aren't North/South enough?
@4n0nx: Well, I understand your point. But maybe some people have specific needs. If we can cover those zones without too much additional cost, it does not hurt to have them.
First: African countries are interconnected by cables encircling it. There are few, if any, land routes. Read: Nigeria to Uganda connection runs via Cape Town - 4 times the distance!
Second: most places there are Telco monopolies in place and bandwidth is prohibitively expensive. This translates to most people having very low bandwidth internet access. Consequently, any latency is greatly enhanced and 100ms distant content takes much longer to load than in Europe or America or even Asia.
Third: most business and other interaction is inter-Africa or very localized, not with other continents. Hence my suggestion for POPs in all key clusters of economic activity, so whatever service you offer can be accessed locally with minimum latency. Said clusters are:
South Africa + Botswana + Namibia + Angola + Mozambique + Zimbabwe
Kenya + Tanzania + Uganda + Rwanda + Ethiopia
Nigeria + Ghana + Cote d'Ivoire + Cameroon
Egypt
Morocco + Algeria
As I have already pointed out above, companies in Africa have most customers in Africa. And it's a much bigger market than, say, Australia. This said, whether the OP needs POPs there at all is an entirely different question, depending on what exactly he has to offer them.
Sure, that would be best - But establishing even a very minimal pop (1server/vps with like 128kbit dedicated BW) in each of this locations will easily run in the thousands of $/€.
South Africa and Egypt are not expensive. I'm pretty sure something reasonable can be had in East Africa. Nigeria and Morocco are tougher propositions. No idea about connectivity from, say, Spain across the Gibraltar Strait, but may be an option to cover Morocco/Algeria? Or maybe cover that area out of Senegal (i.e. one of the most developed markets in Africa)? This said, it's up to the OP to decide how much any of this is worth to him in terms of new business potential.
Yes, ZA and EG are rather cheap - MA as well. Tanzania and Kenya are within close range as well.
Everything else you listed is prohibitively expensive though (1Mbit MTS BW in Zimbabwe costs easily 80$+).
You misunderstood me. I meant one POP in each of the 4 clusters only! I propose to cover Zimbabwe out of South Africa (for best connectivity to other markets in that cluster as well).
I think it would be more reasonable to give the user an opportunity to pick particular locations where he wants the server to be pinged from. On the other hand, it would not be necessary for many users.
Well, this is the point. However to have the project working, defining "zones" is required, at least at the beginning. I will make a nice presentation of the project once I have the base coded and the zones will then make sense.
It seems that Africa is complicated to divide into zones. I guess that I will start with north/south zones for now and research more about the prices/connectivity before defining the zones finer for Africa.