The World Is Flat (or Around The World in 80 milliseconds)

Ah ha! Finally someone else who agrees with me that the "world is flat".

For years, as a Worldwide IT Telecom Director, I have been advocating that it was impractical and virtually impossible to circumference the earth with high-speed (45Mbps+) network connectivity.

Rather in my view, Eastern Europe is at one end of the flat world, and Asia/India was at the other flat end, with North America being at the 'centre' of the world. From a high-speed networking perspective, Europa and Asia/India do not really connect, except the long-way around the earth through North Ameria. Hence, my "flat-earth" viewpoint.

It's silly really. To circumnavigate the earth from a data networking perspective, it should be ~450mSec, which can be described in 3 segments:

1. ~150mSec from Asia/India to North America.
2. ~150mSec from North America to Europe.
3. ~150mSec from Europe to Asia/India.

However the 3rd segment is not readily available from a high-speed, affordable data networking perspective. Hence to get from Asia/India to Europe, you are realistically looking at 300mSec++ latency, over North America (E.g. the LONG way around the earth) which is brutally slow for most of today's bandwidth-guzzling, latency-sensitive software applications.

The solution? Well, one day scientists will increase the speed-of-light. Until then, the common-sense solution for truly global enterprise organzations is to accept the 'flat-earth' philosophy and design their datacentres and global applications around using North America as the centre of the world, thereby never leaving any major global metropolitan centre from its informaiton source more than ~150mSec away. This is practical advice. This works.

Nevermind all this --- I will always believe in my dream of "80mSec Around the World".

-=H=-