I recently began using Amazon’s Northern California region as a Transit VPC / VPN hub – a bit pricier than the others, but certainly the best location for both our office and most of our remote users.  Everything worked great the first couple weeks, then I noticed heavy lag.  Initially I just assumed it to be our office Wifi since everything from home was fine, then realized our parent company had switched our internet service to Verizon (the artist formerly known Worldcom formerly known as MCI formerly known as UUNet formerly known as ALTER.NET)

While many ISPs such as Comcast and Level3 offered under 5ms latency from their Bay Area POPs to Amazon, Verizon’s was 10 times higher.


From Los Angeles, it’s even worse.  One would expect around 20ms.  Instead, you get over 90ms of latency before even leaving Verizon’s network.  If the reverse DNS is correct and that’s truly only gigabit link…shame, shame, shame…


Hard to say exactly what’s going on here, but noticed the only POP with the expected latency Ashburn, VA at around 70ms.  In Dallas Verizon was about 60ms while competitors were 50ms.  My guess here is Verizon partially backhauls their connectivity to AWS through some central point(s), likely Virginia and somewhere near Texas.