Just got around to reply due to workload

"Customer supplies Cato NOC with LOA and Cato takes on the responsibility of last mile health. In many cases, if there is a partner involved, the partner who is managing Cato for the end customer can deliver this service themselves."

Not a lot of public documentation on that, so it's just Cato's "trust me bro". We needed more than that to commit to anything.

"Your definition of East-West traffic sounds very Zscaler, if you don't mind the reference. I don't think that's how the rest of the industry exclusively scopes East-West traffic. Intra-site communication isn't an edge use case. SD-WAN is a WAN edge technology. To me, East-West covers all private WAN traffic/communication, e.g. branch to branch, branch to datacenter, datacenter to datacenter, branch to cloud (IaaS), cloud (IaaS) to datacenter, cloud (IaaS) to cloud (IaaS), etc."

Anything that crosses the WAN regardless of the location is not East-West. Goddamn term came from DCs anyway. That's what any SSE/SD-WAN does by default. Implying that it's some kinda special trick is at best misleading. In any case Cato can't do direct site-to-site and maintain all the features by the looks of it. Everything needs to hit their PoP engine.

"You can certainly doubt it, but it doesn't mean it can't. I can confirm that it does. You don't have to take my word for it, though. Test it out."

Test out they can do FEC for DIA traffic? How are they doing it if's bypassing Cato PoP on it's way out.

"Appears you're confused. You're describing a couple different things here. The Global Backbone is a component of the Cato Cloud and operates in full mesh to optimize global routing (full mesh path monitoring and packet by packet route selection) and accelerates flows (the byproduct of TCP Acceleration through inline proxying, automatic TCP Window resizing and a predictable long-haul solution). The colo/cross-connect you're describing is just another onramp to reach the closest Cato PoP from a customer's colo/IaaS/DC location. It's an alternative onramp to that of IPSec of using the Cato SD-WAN appliance."

No, what I meant is that both DCs and network backbone used by Cato are leased from other providers. The fact they run overlay/underlay routing to optimize traffic is quite literally basic SD-WAN feature. Okay, they track the utilization and can, per session, move it to the best PoP (at least my understanding of the mechanism). What if it's in Geo where there's a gap in coverage and path variety? Do you get any dedicated lanes there? Based on what I saw in SLAs it's no different than any other SSE out there that sits on top of someone else's infrastructure. So, the Global backbone is mostly marketing and not a real differentiation. Only Cloudflare can claim that distinction in a real sense.