ISP with fastest routing

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gksjohn

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#307162 24-Sep-2023 20:49

Can anyone recommend an ISP with the fastest routing to Australia/Asia?
I play competitive games and recently with One NZ's routing fiasco I would rather pay more for an ISP with good routing.

I've read old threads recommending Voyager and Quic, however there is not much recent information.
What would you guys recommend?

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#3131512 24-Sep-2023 20:56

Routing is not static so you could move to another ISP and routing could / would change

Mikek

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#3131524 24-Sep-2023 21:29

Routing can and does change but ISP's have paths they normally use under normal situations, Plus transit providers they use over others.

If Singapore is the region you are talking about with Asia, Its very hard to go past Vocus as they have a path they own to Singapore. Via Perth so its low latency compared to ONE nz for that location. Like Orcon or Slingshot - are the ones I'm talking about, Plus they do use the lowest latency path to Australia,

But I'm pretty sure they have a slower path to Australia that gets used at peak times via the Hawaiki cable, but its 25-26ms if in Auckland to Sydney using Southern cross TGA or One nz's cable is 27-28ms or via Hawaiki its about 34ms so not huge, The Singapore route is about 120ms from auckland Via Perth.

Alot of guys will say latency does not matter, Im not one but like Linux says an ISP could change route or use another cable at anytime so keep that in mind.

yitz

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#3131548 24-Sep-2023 22:26

Mikek:

If Singapore is the region you are talking about with Asia, Its very hard to go past Vocus as they have a path they own to Singapore. Via Perth so its low latency compared to ONE nz for that location. Like Orcon or Slingshot - are the ones I'm talking about, Plus they do use the lowest latency path to Australia,

But I'm pretty sure they have a slower path to Australia that gets used at peak times via the Hawaiki cable, but its 25-26ms if in Auckland to Sydney using Southern cross TGA or One nz's cable is 27-28ms or via Hawaiki its about 34ms so not huge, The Singapore route is about 120ms from auckland Via Perth.

Have you noticed the last week or two they have made a change to using Hawaiiki more? I'm starting to wonder if they've dropped their capacity levels on (or even dropped altogether) one or more other cable systems?

Voyager have their own capacity to Australia and use a mix of Vocus and Spark into Asia. As above Vocus own submarine cables into Asia and I believe Spark have arrangements with NTT for submarine capacity into and within Asia as well. I use an ISP that uses Voyager bandwidth and latency has been good so I can only assume it'll be the same for their direct customers. I've noticed at peak times round trip times to Google can increase 10 ms probably due to use of Hawaiiki cable to Australia but I don't think many games are hosted on Google's Cloud Platform. So with Voyager you will pay a premium but get the best of Vocus and Spark in terms of international connectivity.

Quic also have connections into Singapore via Mercury/Trustpower and Cogent/Sprint, may not be as extensive as Vocus or Spark but you'd have to ask someone on Quic.

Tinkerisk

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#3131551 24-Sep-2023 22:38

Linux:

Routing is not static so you could move to another ISP and routing could / would change

… and is bandwith-dependent from the main nodes not related to the ISP.

- NET: FTTH & VDSL, OPNsense, 10G backbone, GWN APs
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mikesmac

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#3131584 25-Sep-2023 07:57

Mercury have paths to Sydney via all three Trans-Tasman cables (TGA, SX, and Hawaiki) terminating in PoPs located in Equinix3/4, and Global Switch. From Sydney, there are dedicated links to Singapore across two cable systems (ASC, and Indigo) terminating in a PoP at Equinix SG1. North to America, they have two paths, one via SX terminating at Coresite located in San Jose, and one via Hawaiki terminating at Flexential in Portland, with links to Seattle so as to access SIX. PeeringDB is a good source of information for people curious to see where their ISP has PoPs, and their IX type connectivity.

As mentioned previously, routing on the Internet is continually changing, so while having good paths is important, managing the routing on the paths is just as important, eg. ensuring that Asian traffic follows the shortest path and does not go for a bit of a tour across the pacific first. Having the ability to control this is one of the reasons that ISPs try to extend their reach as far as they can.

xor

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#3135700 28-Sep-2023 05:38

Spark and Vodafone have an extra 10ms on top of the other providers (validated myself), it shows up in the comcom report: https://comcom.govt.nz/regulated-industries/telecommunications/monitoring-the-telecommunications-market/monitoring-new-zealands-broadband/Reports-from-Measuring-Broadband-New-Zealand

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Talkiet

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#3135920 28-Sep-2023 13:19

xor:
Linux:

@xor 10ms would make zero difference and don't pull the gaming rubbish on us
10-20ms is a huge number, it's a minimum 33% increase that gets worse depending on jitter and is the difference between packets being accepted or dropped.

Could you restate this please in a way that explains why going from 10-20ms could be the difference between packets being accepted or dropped? I'm unaware of a mechanism that would do this apart from a synthetic application level rule to implement it. (And if someone did that I wouldn't use whatever service they were offering because they'd likely have no idea about how networks work).

This is probably the set of game server latencies you refer to - All RSPs are essentially the same to Australia, and the differences to the US are in some cases likely explained by some RSPs purchasing resilient connectivity and balancing across multiple paths. While this might mean that sometimes you have a few ms extra, it also means any link failures are way less likely to impact users when they occur.

For clarity, and from someone that knows what he's talking about - there is nothing alarming on the charts below, and certainly nothing that would cause me to have any concern about gaming on any ISP listed here (based on the reported latency - there are other reasons I would choose some RSPs over the others)

Please note all comments are from my own brain and don't necessarily represent the position or opinions of my employer, previous employers, colleagues, friends or pets.

SpartanVXL

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#3135936 28-Sep-2023 13:49

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s not the network layer thats the worry it’s usually application. Games with authoritative servers often run at 60Hz (or less, CoD 10Hz) and unless they are known to implement lerp/rollback/compensation in decisions, any increase in latency could cause input to miss a decision boundary (16.6ms).

It’s usually not a factor except for heavily competitive scenarios, and even so if you don’t have a server in aus/nz you’re not going to have a good time anyway. 40ms difference with Singapore may make a difference but I’m not sure it’s possible to get sub 100ms to there from NZ.

Edit: Heroes of the storm should be Aus servers too in that graph, it uses same base as Starcraft II.

xor

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#3136068 28-Sep-2023 18:20

Talkiet:
Could you restate this please in a way that explains why going from 10-20ms could be the difference between packets being accepted or dropped? I'm unaware of a mechanism that would do this apart from a synthetic application level rule to implement it. (And if someone did that I wouldn't use whatever service they were offering because they'd likely have no idea about how networks work).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Datagram_Protocol

As for gaming? If two people make the same action the one that reaches the server first wins and any subsequent actions are discarded.

MaxineN

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#3136124 28-Sep-2023 20:52

xor: Spark and Vodafone have an extra 10ms on top of the other providers (validated myself), it shows up in the comcom report: https://comcom.govt.nz/regulated-industries/telecommunications/monitoring-the-telecommunications-market/monitoring-new-zealands-broadband/Reports-from-Measuring-Broadband-New-Zealand

How are you testing? How have you validated this?

SpartanVXL: Correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s not the network layer thats the worry it’s usually application. Games with authoritative servers often run at 60Hz (or less, CoD 10Hz) and unless they are known to implement lerp/rollback/compensation in decisions, any increase in latency could cause input to miss a decision boundary (16.6ms).

It’s usually not a factor except for heavily competitive scenarios, and even so if you don’t have a server in aus/nz you’re not going to have a good time anyway. 40ms difference with Singapore may make a difference but I’m not sure it’s possible to get sub 100ms to there from NZ.

Edit: Heroes of the storm should be Aus servers too in that graph, it uses same base as Starcraft II.

Correct. In my entire time gaming over many years and over various regions and also in different locations(lived in AKL, WHG and also ChCh). I can tell you that I don't notice it until we're going 100ms and over. Also many game developers handle their multiplayer side VERY differently, I could spend a good few hours explaining the difference between server authoritive and client authoritive, which game has what, hybrid models > also tick rates and which games have insane lag comp(looking at you CoD and FFXIV although FFXIV is way more understandable) and which games have very very tight (prefers the lower latency player vs the higher one that shot) compensation but that is not what this thread is about nor should we turn it into that.

I'll entertain the reaction point as well (because we missed this one and I'm also a gamer) > using the human benchmark tool my average reaction time seems to be in the 201ms range. I am below the median range of 273ms. Consider the photon latency of a monitor, latency of your mouse and keyboard(polling rate measured in Hz), THEN your GPU and CPU rendering time (measured in milliseconds) AND then the game server. Yes I can see the desire for decreasing it. However there are diminishing returns.

My question to xor (if they want to entertain this is) is, can you please explain your testing methodology, please also post statistics from your own testing and also please show us how, what and where are you testing yourself. I'd be interested to know where this 10ms is coming from.

My question to OP (Now I'm putting on my One NZ hat and I actually think this is more important) > can you please tell us what games/servers locations you are affected by? Please include path pings and also trace routes to game servers IPs where possible(resmon is your friend).

Ramblings from a mysterious lady who's into tech. Warning I may often create zingers.

freitasm

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#3137758 2-Oct-2023 13:57

I have removed a lot of garbage and blocked people from posting on this topic.

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gksjohn

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#3137828 2-Oct-2023 14:41

I've been contacted by another employee and the issue seems to have been resolved!

If you must know, All Riot Games Sydney servers, Apex Legends Sydney server's were affected for me.
There was also a post on r/Auckland with others reporting just servers to Sydney had high ping and bad packet loss.

yitz

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#3137882 2-Oct-2023 17:40

Going by a Reddit post quoting One NZ support the cause in this case was a congested peering link:
https://old.reddit.com/r/auckland/comments/16o9uao/any_gamers_here_who_suddenly_have_high_ping_in/k1tw71t/

This has happened in the past on other ISPs too:
e.g. Spark https://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=39&topicid=221409&page_no=2

So I guess the question here would be which ISP would be the fastest to respond to demand and re-route Internet traffic?

One NZ's response in this case seems to have taken about a week, as I recall the previously linked incident with Spark took 2-3 days.

With the Commerce Commission taking measurements I wonder if some ISPs have implemented dedicated peering links for those traffic destinations?

freitasm

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#3137886 2-Oct-2023 17:45

It always goes back to "that's how the Internet works. If one link is down it automatically re-routes. Shit happens. Power gets cut, firmware updates fail, routers die of old age, one day or another a router will be diverted. It will come back when it comes back."

All ISPs will have a bad day because of this. Unless someone joins a very under-resourced ISP the likelihood is that routing will be similar at some point.

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yitz

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#3137904 2-Oct-2023 18:53

New routing paradigms like high priority edge-to-edge express paths are not out of the picture with today's fibre access and terrestrial/submarine infrastructure, just a question of when they will go mass market.

Keeping to traditional Internet infrastructure we know even the reluctant peerers have stood up dedicated peering with the ComCom's testing servers.

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