Global Connectivity Vendor Selection

TeleGeography produce a topological map of submarine cables which is of interest to hft firms. There are many aspects to consider when procuring global connectivity.

Before you choose a suppler, perhaps some important questions to ask are:

1. What are the fibre miles versus physical miles of long haul links
   
2. How do you measure your quoted latency
3. What is your underlying network technology and how is it provisioned
   
4. What network equipment do you use for your core network
   
5. How many hardware queues on the above equipment do you allocate to our service
6. When using third parties, what is their underlying technology and distribution methodology
   
7. What hand-off equipment do you use
   
8. What can the above deliver in terms of serialisation capability
   
9. What traffic shaping do you perform
10. How often do you sample cdr violation
11. Do you report CDR violation
12. Do you offer QoS
13. Do you offer IGMP snooping

Not an exhaustive list, but a good boilerplate for vendor assessment. I'll expand on each point in due course.