North America POS connecting to server in Asia

Question

I have a client who (for some reason) have POS in North-East America, but the POS company and servers are in Asia. This results in occasional slow, duplicate, or incomplete transactions. The POS company in Asia refuses to spin up an instance in North America. Dumb question, but is there a way to speed this up, for example through optimized middleware? So the NA POS connects to a NA middleware which connects to middleware in Asia which is connected to Asia POS (NA POS <-> NA MW <-> Asia MW <-> Asia POS Server), but the connection between the NA MW and Asia MW is much faster? Is there another way that is within our control?

Answer 1

Network latency between east United States and say Japan is on the order of 170 milliseconds, per monitoring company WonderNetwork and also Azure. That's one packet doing nothing. Actual applications may do many connections and have other delays. Even in good conditions there may be human noticeable latency problems.

Failed and duplicate (!) transactions sounds like a miserable thing to use. Take the poor user experience to whomever is responsible for this point of sale system. The vendor, maybe a service provider. They also need to hear the complaints.

Ideal would be a server instance on the same continent. Clearly it doesn't work with halfway around the planet latency, cutting that in half could do some good.

Also investigate proxying through fast private transit. Such as putting things behind a content delivery network, or VPN via your cloud provider of choice. Some of those only work with http applications. Also, may require cooperation with the origin, in other words you probably need to have the POS provider involved.