Recommendations for gamer-friendly ISP

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745 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2633128 10-Jan-2021 16:50

@Linux and @Jase2985, good points.

Interestingly, the Vodafne HFC route to the Sydney server is actually quicker than the BigPipe UFB one.

tracert appears to show that a number of extra hops (?) spent bouncing around inside Spark's infrastructure before finally heading off to the US.

The US round-trip seems like such an unnecessary detour.

In any event, HFC seems about 10ms faster.

Will look into it further when I have more cycles.

zaptor

745 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2633130 10-Jan-2021 17:13

toejam316: If you want a different ISP, Focus or 2Degrees are my non-Spark recommendations.
If you're getting limited performance bypassing the router, try an alternative device such as a late model Core i7 or Ryzen laptop/desktop.

Regarding routes, Spark has a route to Sydney, the general complaint with Spark is that they don't have local open peering so some traffic goes to Sydney then back again. You'll find you either get a Spark based provider who has better pings to Spark hosted things, or a non-Spark ISP who has better pings to non-Spark things. Generally from NZ to Sydney ranges from 20-60ms depending where you are in the country.

If you want to be an extremely optimized gamer, I believe your best bet is to live somewhere close to Mayoral Drive or Airdale Street.

Thanks.

Will check out those ISPs.

Interesting info about the Sydney routing. I thought Spark did provide a direct route to the AWS Asia/Pacific Region (Sydney) - where the Oceania gaming servers are hosted, for corporate clients. But, not sure about the consumer space.

That final suggestion probably exceeds my initial budget for this exercise by just a teeny weeny bit.

toejam316

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#2633138 10-Jan-2021 17:24

Focus was a brain fart - I meant Voyager, but somehow lost Focus and typed Focus instead.

I don't know exactly where the Spark link terminates in Sydney, and I'm not sure how much I'd be allowed to say even if I knew, but suffice to say that I can assure you of the Spark presence in Sydney that is managed by Spark themselves, and I believe the globalgateway.net.nz stuff is Spark owned.

Out of curiosity, what are you seeing a round trip to the US for? Wouldn't mind poking that myself to see what's going on with it. Most of my stuff I play in Aus tends to hover around 30ms and I'm in the Waikato, near Hamilton. Call of Duty, League of Legends, Counter-Strike, Rainbow Six Siege and a few others off the top of my head.

Anything I say is the ramblings of an ill informed, opinionated so-and-so, and not representative of any of my past, present or future employers, and is also probably best disregarded.

zaptor

745 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2633144 10-Jan-2021 17:39

toejam316:

Out of curiosity, what are you seeing a round trip to the US for? Wouldn't mind poking that myself to see what's going on with it. Most of my stuff I play in Aus tends to hover around 30ms and I'm in the Waikato, near Hamilton. Call of Duty, League of Legends, Counter-Strike, Rainbow Six Siege and a few others off the top of my head.

Good question. I need to double-check/validate my trace routes first. Will get back to you on that one.

The best place to get/confirm the actual server IPs is from the gaming PC in question (probably best to identify destination IPs while games are running). Unfortunately, it's currently occupied.

michaelmurfy

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#2633298 10-Jan-2021 22:54

If you are running Windows then this will be a major point for why you can’t cap 400Mbit on the upstream. My Ryzen build doesn’t but when booted into Linux it does.

I wouldn’t stress, there’s nothing wrong with your connection and it is operating within normal spec. It is fully up to you regarding your ISP but I seriously doubt you’ll see any difference switching in terms of gaming experience.

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Jase2985

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#2633314 11-Jan-2021 06:41

michaelmurfy: If you are running Windows then this will be a major point for why you can’t cap 400Mbit on the upstream. My Ryzen build doesn’t but when booted into Linux it does.

yeah nah, ryzen 5 5600x below and the rzyen 5 3600 gives similar results.

https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/d/e270d61f-9192-4aeb-bbee-a617f8062fd4

zaptor

745 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2634535 12-Jan-2021 20:24

toejam316:

Out of curiosity, what are you seeing a round trip to the US for? Wouldn't mind poking that myself to see what's going on with it. Most of my stuff I play in Aus tends to hover around 30ms and I'm in the Waikato, near Hamilton. Call of Duty, League of Legends, Counter-Strike, Rainbow Six Siege and a few others off the top of my head.

Hey @toejam316, apologies for the delayed response. Been busy at work, just got the spare cycles now to respond.

So, after obtaining a few IP addresses, then trying to determine which one of the many open ports was the primary/actual gaming one (as opposed to one used for administrative/control/statistical purposes), it appears the BigPipe/Spark latency is related to a couple of issues.

1. The 20+ ms latency between the Spark akbr7 and br3 global gateway servers:

League of Legends:

5 22 ms 22 ms 22 ms ae2-6.tkbr12.global-gateway.net.nz [122.56.127.17]
6 48 ms 49 ms 48 ms et2-0-0.sebr3.global-gateway.net.nz [202.50.232.190]

5 22 ms 23 ms 22 ms ae7-2.akbr7.global-gateway.net.nz [122.56.119.53]
6 50 ms 50 ms 50 ms et1-0-0.sgbr3.global-gateway.net.nz [122.56.119.30]

Fortnite:

5 23 ms 23 ms 23 ms ae7-2.akbr7.global-gateway.net.nz [122.56.119.53]
6 47 ms 47 ms 47 ms et10-0-5.sgbr3.global-gateway.net.nz [202.50.232.110]

5 23 ms 22 ms 23 ms ae7-2.akbr7.global-gateway.net.nz [122.56.119.53]
6 50 ms 50 ms 50 ms et1-0-0.sgbr3.global-gateway.net.nz [122.56.119.30]

Now, unless the br3 servers are actually located in the US (which seems to make sense), then the above latency for servers that are effectively next to each other would seem to me to be an issue.

2. The comparatively high latency up to the akbr7 servers:

Since we already have the akbr7 timings above, for comparison this what we get with Vodafone HFC:

3 10 ms 11 ms 11 ms 10.200.12.17

That server seems to be the last hop within NZ, before going state-side. Which means it's an extra 10ms penalty when using Spark/BigPipe.

Both Fortnite and League traffic on the main gaming port were UDP.

Last I checked, we were still sub-300Mpbs upstream on the speedtest - yet, 900Mbps down was fine...

Currently, gaming on the "slow" Vodafone 200/20 - which, for us, is actually a better experience than 900/500 on BigPipe.

Anyhow, I imagine if you run a trace against any one of the dozens of gaming servers hosted on AWS Sydney, that hopefully might give you a good view of how 2Degrees traffic travels.

I did the above traces a few days ago, so I'm not even sure if the Fortnite EC2 instance is still running. I imagine Epic stands them up on demand.

I'd recommend running your game, determing the IPs, finding which one is the proper "game" one, then tracing to that.

Would be curious to know your findings on 2Degrees.

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Jase2985

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#2634541 12-Jan-2021 20:50

@zaptor where in NZ are you located?

What servers are you pinging? why not post up the full trace results?

RunningMan

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#2634544 12-Jan-2021 21:06

ICMP is frequently deprioritised on routers, so don't be misled by arbitrarily high latency during a traceroute.

zaptor

745 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2634561 12-Jan-2021 21:44

Jase2985:

@zaptor where in NZ are you located?

What servers are you pinging? why not post up the full trace results?

Based in Wellington area.

Here are a couple of Fortnite IPs, that you're more than welcome to try - you're on 2D as well aren't you?:

* 13.55.174.202
* 3.25.205.125

Tending to get around 50-55ms on the last hop which responds. Bear in mind, I'm not sure if those servers are still running at the moment. I think you're best bet would be trace to a recently active one.

Those timings appear to be the main bits of interest (where most of the time is spent). The other hops seem relatively negligible. I personally find it somewhat distracting when dumping full traces for diagnostics purposes that it's typically 1 or 2 hops that end up being the focus, and the rest is effectively noise. So, when you have multiple comments with full traces, it can become a lot of noise.

yitz

2080 posts

Uber Geek

#2634564 12-Jan-2021 22:07

akbr7 and tkbr12 is Mayoral Drive and Takapuna / Glenfield

sebr3 and sgbr3 is Sydney Equinix and Sydney Global Switch

So basically landing locations for Southern Cross cable.

Pretty sure Amazon AWS also have capacity on Hawaiki Cable which may not give the best latency between Auckland and Sydney / Aus east coast.

Jase2985

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#2634565 12-Jan-2021 22:16

Im on voyager but my traffic seems to be going most of the same route as yours

br3 servers are in australia (i would say sydney at a guess), br7 is in Auckland, the 25ish ms between them is expected.

but remember you only need to care about the ping to the last hop/end point, anything else in the middle is just muddying the waters as servers can and do de-prioritize ICMP (ping) packets.

seeing as you have only posted part of the tracert its hard to say much more like where your traffic is going to cause it to take 20ms to get from wgn to auckland, i would expect 10-12ms for that. but yours is about 10seconds longer.

zaptor

745 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2634567 12-Jan-2021 22:27

yitz:

AWS Sydney (ap-southeast-2) region actually geographically covers Sydney (NSW) and Melbourne (VIC) which are about 10ms apart, not sure of exact setup of gaming services but maybe there's front-end load balancing between the two geographical locations which happens to depend on ISP?

akbr7 and tkbr12 is Mayoral Drive and Takapuna / Glenfield

sebr3 and sgbr3 is Sydney Equinix and Sydney Global Switch

So basically landing locations for Southern Cross cable.

Interesting. Thanks for the clarification.

It didn't occur to me that sebr3 and sgbr3 were Sydney switches.

Curious. So, doing some rudimentary math, getting 30ms to a gaming server hosted in Sydney (assuming we don't bounce around the world) is not out of the realms of possibility?

Notes:
(1) We're actually getting 25ms on Fortnite Creative - which in our instance is basically a sandboxed singleplayer Fortnite, still hosted in AWS Sydney
(2) If playing a full 100 pvp game, then it varies anywhere from 30ms-50ms
(3) When doing tracing earlier on, the server for Fortnite Creative and Fortnite Battle Royale resolved to the same exact IP
(4) This is all on Vodafone HFC

yitz

2080 posts

Uber Geek

#2634568 12-Jan-2021 22:31

Actually I take back the AWS Sydney / Melbourne thing I think I've confused this with another cloud provider.

According to your partial traceroute you seem to be getting 11ms to Auckland on Vodafone vs 22ms to Auckland on Bigpipe, what are the ping times for the preceding hops?

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#2634572 12-Jan-2021 22:39

zaptor:

Jase2985:

@zaptor where in NZ are you located?

What servers are you pinging? why not post up the full trace results?

Based in Wellington area.

Here are a couple of Fortnite IPs, that you're more than welcome to try - you're on 2D as well aren't you?:

* 13.55.174.202
* 3.25.205.125

Tending to get around 50-55ms on the last hop which responds. Bear in mind, I'm not sure if those servers are still running at the moment. I think you're best bet would be trace to a recently active one.

Those timings appear to be the main bits of interest (where most of the time is spent). The other hops seem relatively negligible. I personally find it somewhat distracting when dumping full traces for diagnostics purposes that it's typically 1 or 2 hops that end up being the focus, and the rest is effectively noise. So, when you have multiple comments with full traces, it can become a lot of noise.

2D Gigabit fibre - Auckland:

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