I've got the latency blues...

[Transition]

So here's the deal. We have six locations in the state of Minnesota. 1 Mother branch and 5 babies. 3 of our branches are tied into the host by the means of a 56k frame relay circuit, slooooowww and expensive, but low latency (which is great for our use). 3 of our other branches are currently using VPN w/ DSL to tie into the host location. 95% of all traffic is pushed through our distribution software, which is basically a fancy character based telnet session that ties into our host.

We recently started moving branches off the frame onto VPN, but get complaints in regards to latency and delays between actions in the distribution software. Before with the frame we could get a ~40-50ms latency from remote location to host. Now, when taking a baby branch and connecting to the host we're seeing a ~150ms+ latency. Mind you we're using a 640 up/down DSL connection at our host - which is fine in terms of bandwidth but doesn't work well for latency.

So, now my problem presented is how can i bring these baby branches into the host location with a good latency of 80ms or lower. All of the branches on DSL right now are using different ISP's, mostly due to availability problems.

I'm trying to explore some options as far as what i can do cost effectively to keep our latency low, and keep our users happy.

 

[spidey07]

Transition,

Try making sure all of the internet connections are from a single carrier/provider. Then you could try a managed VPN from that carrier with some kind of latency guarantees.

Otherwise its an internet crap shoot so to speak.