Why does nobody talk about the congestion on Level 3's backbone in Chicago?

I was over at the 350 East Cermak data center last Tuesday for a routine circuit handoff, and I noticed something off. The latency on a test traceroute jumped from 12ms to 68ms for no clear reason around 2 PM. I asked the on-site NOC guy about it, and he said that peering point has been oversubscribed by about 30% for three months now. My own monitoring tools later showed packet loss hitting 2% during peak hours. Has anyone else seen this kind of lag coming out of that hub lately?

2 comments

2 Comments

hall.charles1mo ago

Blame it on the mega-rich hedge funds cramming their trading racks in there. Probably cheaper for them to dump latency than actually upgrade the fiber.

ryan_sanchez1mo ago

Have you actually tried just sticking a cheapo MikroTik switch in there and calling it a day? I swapped out a $5k Cisco for a $400 one in my colo rack a few years back and honestly couldn't tell the difference for my workloads. The latency difference was like 0.2ms on a good day, and my profit margins didn't even notice it. Those hedge fund guys are just throwing money at tiny problems to feel important. If your setup isn't high frequency trading, a basic switch with a decent firmware update works fine. Saved me a ton of cash and headache.