The 2000ms Event Horizon

By 1996, oversubscription was the commercial model for public Internet delivery, and Frame Relay backhaul was the default economic choice for cross-border paths. Carrier-managed IP ports were engineered for statistical multiplexing, busy-hour congestion, and best-effort outcomes, producing multi-second latency spikes, loss, and session instability that pushed traffic past the 2000ms Event Horizon. When the path crossed that threshold, SSL handshakes failed often enough that secure global commerce could not scale.

Digital Island existed to replace that global failure mode with a different class of network. We provisioned a Tier-0 worldwide network based on dedicated International Private Line Circuits, controlled routing under our own AS, and nonstop operations measured against defined outcomes. The result was SLA and QoS backed sub-300ms round-trip performance across major markets and 100 percent availability of repeatable cross-border SSL session completion at operational scale, as defined and evidenced in the contract and measurement artifacts linked from the home page in this section.That is what enabled the globalization of eCommerce in practice.

(Technical detail: Oversubscribed by Design Carrier-Managed IP Ports and Why “T-1 Internet” Still Failed.)

Definition

2000ms Event Horizon: A recurring operational condition where round-trip latency exceeds 2 seconds on real user paths, typically with loss and jitter, producing retransmits, stalls, and application-layer timeouts that make stateful session completion unreliable across borders.

Why Frame Relay and oversubscription produced the Event Horizon

Frame Relay was the default transport model

In the 1996 era, many international and cross-border paths were built on Frame Relay economics. It was widely deployed and widely oversubscribed. The outcome was predictable: busy-hour latency spikes, jitter, and loss that broke session integrity.

Oversubscription was the business model

Carrier-managed Internet access was not sold as deterministic transport. It was sold as shared service engineered for aggregate utilization. Even when a customer purchased a “T-1” access rate, the delivered behavior was governed by shared aggregation and interconnect capacity inside carrier clouds and between carriers.

Best-effort reachability existed. Contractible end-to-end behavior did not.

Why 2000ms breaks secure commerce

TCP becomes fragile under high RTT and loss

When RTT spikes and loss increases, TCP recovery time expands, retransmissions multiply, and throughput collapses. Sessions become long, fragile, and prone to timeout.

SSL multiplies the RTT problem

SSL establishment requires multiple round trips. When RTT is already high and unstable, handshake completion becomes unreliable. Small amounts of additional delay or loss push handshakes over timeout thresholds.

Practical outcome: cross-border SSL sessions fail often enough that secure commerce cannot be treated as dependable at global scale.

What users and enterprises experienced before Digital Island

  • Secure logins failed intermittently across borders.

  • Transactions timed out mid-session.

  • Downloads restarted after timeouts.

  • Performance varied wildly by time of day due to busy-hour congestion.

The Internet could be reachable and still unusable for global commerce.

The carrier-managed IP port example, stated precisely

A carrier-managed IP port in an international metro with Frame Relay backhaul to the United States provided reachability. It did not provide enforceable outcomes.

Even when marketed as “T-1,” the customer did not control shared aggregation, inter-carrier interconnects, or busy-hour congestion. The behavior that mattered to sessions was downstream of the access circuit.

How Digital Island crossed the Event Horizon

Digital Island replaced the oversubscribed global delivery model with:

  • Dedicated International Private Line Circuits provisioned as clear capacity.

  • Backbone interconnect engineered as a controlled fabric, not incidental transit.

  • Backbone-facing ports terminated under our own AS number, routing policy, and equipment.

  • Nonstop operations measured against defined outcomes and enforced through customer contracts.

The result was a worldwide utility where secure sessions could be treated as dependable. Cross-border SSL became operational, measurable, and contractible, supported by sub-300ms round-trip behavior across major markets.

Before and after

Before: oversubscription and Frame Relay were the rule. SSL across borders was reachable but unreliable. Global commerce could not scale.
After: dedicated IPLCs and controlled routing produced repeatable secure sessions. SSL became a utility. Global commerce could operate.