We’ve added a new point of presence (PoP) in Sydney, Australia, that connects directly with a local Tier 1 carrier in Australia. This means that all of our customers in Australia and New Zealand now have automatic access to latency-free voice calls.
Before we added the new PoP, we routed Australian and New Zealand phone calls through our closest PoP, which was in Hong Kong. The extra network hops added 130–150 milliseconds (ms) of latency to each call, delaying the time it took for voice traffic to travel from the speaker’s mouth to the receiver’s ear. The human ear starts to notice voice delays when latency is greater than 250ms. Even though the International Telecommunication Union’s recommendation for most voice applications states that delays should be kept below 150ms, we knew that having a PoP in Australia was critical to giving our customers the best possible voice quality.
Improvements with Australia PoP
Now, all local calls within Australia and New Zealand are kept within the region and routed through our direct connection with a local Australian carrier. This allows for sub-20ms access to our local Australian carrier, which means there’s virtually no latency.
As always, our Voice API comes with a full stack of capabilities to help you build powerful voice calling features for your business:
Security and availability
Our new Australian PoP is equipped with state-of-the-art onsite security and industry-standard network controls including:
- 24/7 surveillance: Dedicated 24/7 state-of-the-art electronic surveillance and physical security measures at all of our server locations.
- Backup encryption: Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256-bit encryption used to encrypt all stored backups.
- Network redundancy: Redundant links reroute traffic over backup networks in less than two seconds in case of backbone failover.
- Systems and data redundancy: Multiple instances and redundant servers with active pairs trigger automatically in case of failover.