For the Gamers: Thinking of switching from 2Degrees Fibre

Forums › 2degrees (including Slingshot, Orcon, Flip, Stuff Fibre, MyRepublic, 2talk and Vocus) › For the Gamers: Thinking of switching from 2Degrees Fibre - any suggestions?

heinreich

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#323896 31-Jan-2026 16:03

Ola peeps,

First post - sorry if this topic has been discussed at length.

I have been with 2Degrees broadband for about a year with no issues. After the SEA cable damage in Dec 2025 (which has now apparently been repaired?) my latency on gaming servers in the SEA area has gone from 120ms (where it used to be) to 160ms. (a small enough difference that it affects competitive gameplay).

My mate is with Mercury, and he gets the expected 120ms ping.

Any ISPs you can suggest that I move to (other than Mercury which is currently at pos 1)?

Thanks in advance

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#3457500 31-Jan-2026 16:54

Got a server IP for us to test with to give you an indication of what you can expect from the various ISP's ?

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heinreich

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#3457504 31-Jan-2026 17:07

Haha, that would help hey.

Its the awful dota 2 server in SEA

103.10.124.1

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#3457505 31-Jan-2026 17:16

Have you done a Trace route showing where the increase in latency is?

Changing ISP does not automatically mean you are going to get lower latency to the server or same latency as someone else on another ISP

heinreich

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#3457506 31-Jan-2026 17:31

Tracing route to 103-10-124-1.valve.net [103.10.124.1]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.50.1
2 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms v4.cpcak4-bng1.tranzpeer.net [101.98.0.100]
3 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 10.101.0.158
4 167 ms 168 ms 168 ms 103-10-124-1.valve.net [103.10.124.1]

So, for shits and giggles I just tried "ExitLag" (something I've known about but never bothered with - not expecting it to actually work). It instantly reduced my in game ping from 164ish to 118. Switching it off, it goes back to 164.

Yes, I understand that changing my ISP won't guarantee a lower latency. For now I am just trying to compare apples with apples as my friend who stays 10km away from me is with Mercury, and his ping to the same server is sitting around 119ms. So obviously Mercury / 2Degrees are using different routing.

grantius

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#3457508 31-Jan-2026 17:35

heinreich:

Haha, that would help hey.

Its the awful dota 2 server in SEA

103.10.124.1

Pinging this from Quic off auckland I get around 290ms... so that won't help you

heinreich

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#3457510 31-Jan-2026 17:39

Oh dear... thanks anyway for helping me with the decision. Was about to bite the bullet

Anyone else here on Mercury perhaps which can confirm the latency?

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MaxineN

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#3457512 31-Jan-2026 17:50

heinreich:

Oh dear... thanks anyway for helping me with the decision. Was about to bite the bullet

Anyone else here on Mercury perhaps which can confirm the latency?

From a CHC connection on Mercury(AS55850).

Why play on Singapore anyway?

Aussie is just 37ms from CHC. Even less if you're in Auckland.

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DjShadow

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#3457513 31-Jan-2026 17:51

From One NZ Fibre

traceroute to 103.10.124.1 (103.10.124.1), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 192.168.68.1 (192.168.68.1) 3.599 ms 3.375 ms 3.294 ms
2 * * *
3 lo151.bgnzftc02.akl.vf.net.nz (203.109.180.133) 16.447 ms 18.726 ms 18.641 ms
4 134.159.174.41 (134.159.174.41) 19.709 ms 18.110 ms 18.018 ms
5 i-90.hptw-core02.telstraglobal.net (202.84.142.90) 20.718 ms 20.438 ms 19.355 ms
6 i-2.sydo-core04.telstraglobal.net (202.84.143.129) 46.379 ms 42.894 ms 42.804 ms
7 i-2.sydo-core04.telstraglobal.net (202.84.143.129) 42.730 ms 43.231 ms 41.198 ms
8 i-10304.sydo-core03.telstraglobal.net (202.84.222.129) 40.795 ms 40.662 ms 40.582 ms
9 i-10304.sydo-core03.telstraglobal.net (202.84.222.129) 79.753 ms 79.664 ms 82.163 ms
10 i-15303.pthp-core02.telstraglobal.net (202.84.140.33) 81.722 ms 126.891 ms 120.048 ms
11 * * *
12 i-93.istt04.telstraglobal.net (202.84.224.190) 686.584 ms 163.714 ms 163.550 ms
13 unknown.telstraglobal.net (210.57.38.53) 164.848 ms 128.874 ms 128.764 ms

Trace doesn’t get anything after hop 13

Ping Avg is 129ms

ChrisNZL

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#3457515 31-Jan-2026 18:30

I've been with Skinny over a year.

Used to get ~120ms to SEA, now it's ~160-170ms. (roughly started happening several months ago, not super sure, but definitely noticeable)

Tend to just stick with Aus server, about ~27ms.

Sometimes additionally queue up for Japan because that's ~145ms or so...

Don't know what happened to the SEA route.

heinreich

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#3457516 31-Jan-2026 18:32

MaxineN:

heinreich:

Oh dear... thanks anyway for helping me with the decision. Was about to bite the bullet

Anyone else here on Mercury perhaps which can confirm the latency?

From a CHC connection on Mercury(AS55850).

Why play on Singapore anyway?

Aussie is just 37ms from CHC. Even less if you're in Auckland.

Thanks for that. Another confirmation.

And I play on SEA because dota is already too toxic, seems like Aus takes it to a new level. Also, the queue times are shorter on SEA and match quality feels a bit more balanced (Aus is very one sided stomps majority of the time in my crappy bracket)

Thanks for the One NZ test as well, worthwhile data to my consideration.

Skinny is part of Spark? Haven't heard great things about them unfortunately. Seems if I do make a leap it might be to Mercury - if 2Degrees remain adamant they cant reroute anything or help reduce the latency.

Talkiet

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#3457519 31-Jan-2026 19:46

This is generally a terrible metric to base a decision on. Some ISPs might load balance over different routes for different customers at different times, so 2 customers on the same ISP may have different results from each other on different days.

An ISP (or their upstreams) might make a decision tomorrow that changes their routing to either improve or degrade latency on some routes. They might even do it to move from a congested (but shorter) circuit to an empty (but longer) route.

Changing ISPs because of a 40ms difference to one set of servers when you're otherwise happy with the server seems shortsighted to me.

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#3457521 31-Jan-2026 20:06

People really need to stop changing ISP's based on latency changes to services.

It doesn't matter who you're with - routes change. You could change to an ISP and they could have issues the very next day. That's just the nature of the internet.

30ms different is not going to cause any issues for you. What will cause issues is if you're experiencing packet loss to these services. Bets are, if you did not display "ping" in your game you wouldn't notice a single thing. It's a terrible metric and often misunderstood by gamers.

Looks like your latency is within the national average: https://atlas.ripe.net/measurements/152159370/results

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heinreich

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#3457523 31-Jan-2026 20:26

michaelmurfy:

People really need to stop changing ISP's based on latency changes to services.

It doesn't matter who you're with - routes change. You could change to an ISP and they could have issues the very next day. That's just the nature of the internet.

30ms different is not going to cause any issues for you. What will cause issues is if you're experiencing packet loss to these services. Bets are, if you did not display "ping" in your game you wouldn't notice a single thing. It's a terrible metric and often misunderstood by gamers.

Looks like your latency is within the national average: https://atlas.ripe.net/measurements/152159370/results

Yeah nah. Agree to disagree on this. I know very well what 120ms feels like, and what 164ms feels like. So there isnt much to debate about something that is subjective like this. So there is nothing 'misunderstood' wrt this.

Agreed, packet loss (which is luckily 0%) would be much worse and unplayable, but it doesnt change the aforementioned.

And yes, I agree with both of you on changing Peter for Paul overnight due to "one result" seems foolhardy as Paul can suddenly change their routing tomorrow and then I sit back in the same boat.

At this point in time I am merely exploring my options as I have not had a reason to change anything for 12 months+

PS. The link you pasted clearly shows the huge disparity between latency among the providers...

MaxineN

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#3457524 31-Jan-2026 20:39

heinreich:

michaelmurfy:

People really need to stop changing ISP's based on latency changes to services.

It doesn't matter who you're with - routes change. You could change to an ISP and they could have issues the very next day. That's just the nature of the internet.

30ms different is not going to cause any issues for you. What will cause issues is if you're experiencing packet loss to these services. Bets are, if you did not display "ping" in your game you wouldn't notice a single thing. It's a terrible metric and often misunderstood by gamers.

Looks like your latency is within the national average: https://atlas.ripe.net/measurements/152159370/results

Yeah nah. Agree to disagree on this. I know very well what 120ms feels like, and what 164ms feels like. So there isnt much to debate about something that is subjective like this. So there is nothing 'misunderstood' wrt this.

Agreed, packet loss (which is luckily 0%) would be much worse and unplayable, but it doesnt change the aforementioned.

And yes, I agree with both of you on changing Peter for Paul overnight due to "one result" seems foolhardy as Paul can suddenly change their routing tomorrow and then I sit back in the same boat.

At this point in time I am merely exploring my options as I have not had a reason to change anything for 12 months+

PS. The link you pasted clearly shows the huge disparity between latency among the providers...

As a gamer... and as someone that plays Dota and also recently played on the US West servers. I got used to it very quickly to the point where I could not notice it.

As someone who has shopped and been with almost every provider... and used to work for one. I think it is a terrible decision to churn unless you have a deal that nobody can compete with, or repeatedly shit customer service to the point where you no longer want to deal with them. Changing because of how the internet works and how dynamic routing can be day to day is a bad idea.

I mean let's just take this beautiful mess that is happening via GSL at some how a consistent time too. I could with my own infra that I pay money for, probably steer my traffic around to fix this(got a lovely project around this)... but I won't. Small blip that is only affecting me at a time I am not a awake at. I don't care.

Just because Mercury has a PoP in Singapore (via Equinix too).. does not mean it's going to be your golden ticket to lag free gaming. Things can still happen. Packet loss is infinitely worse than higher latency. That routing could change one day and suddenly you'll be going to Seattle and then via Tokyo and then through to Singapore.

You're trying to set yourself up for 12 months expecting a service to remain like that for 12 months. It won't. I am sure Mercury will fall on it's face.... Just like every other ISP does. Are you going to switch then too?

I'm not trying to be mean about this. I'm trying to be very realistic. Unless you're gonna get an amazing deal... I wouldn't switch. If anything... I would just deal with it, or use your ExitLag VPN.

Or better yet. Come back to the Australian servers... and just mute and report people who are toxic.

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michaelmurfy

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#3457527 31-Jan-2026 20:46

heinreich: PS. The link you pasted clearly shows the huge disparity between latency among the providers...

Correct - and it'll be different tomorrow. It's the nature of the internet.

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