Selecting an Internet service provider based purely on the cost of local Internet access service is a common practice, but this approach is causing application performance problems for enterprises that increasingly use the Internet to connect Asian branch offices to their data centers, and to cloud services.

Because enterprises focus on buying Internet access connectivity at their locations, and ignore evaluating whether Internet service can support their end-to-end connectivity requirements, they fail to ensure that the end-to-end latency that delay-sensitive applications require can be fulfilled. Thus, end-to-end network latency often is two to three times greater than what can be optimally obtained, and can render applications unusable.

Poor application performance often is blamed on the lack of quality of service (QoS), and on an overly congested Internet infrastructure. However, in Asia, the most severe application performance issues often are caused by traffic taking an unnecessarily long physical path through the Internet.