Seth Godin reminded me this morning that the customer is always right - or he won't be a customer for long.
This comes at a good time, because a recent conference call about latency on a Layer 2 private line had me biting my cheek. With the industry average SLA being 44 ms of latency on a private line, anything in the single digits is considered excellent connectivity.
Every device - switch or router - adds a little latency. Regen stations add a micro amount of latency. And then there is the finite speed that light can travel.
When the metrics get drawn into the equation - latency or speed - setting customer expectations properly is vital to a happy customer. (I didn't do enough discovery on this to realize that single digit latency was needed - so I really didn't set customer expectations properly.)
Back to re-design on the network to see about getting the latency to 1 ms, because Seth is right, the customer is right.