SEACOM now live on Equiano cable

cavedog said:
To pick up what networks exactly? I'm not a major gamer but the big games aren't in PT. It's England, The Netherlands, Germany, France. Using some public looking glasses from Cogent and HE the latency from Lisbon to Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam and London doesn't look good. 45-50ms
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The point is from Portugal to France there are direct terrestrial routes, IE Blizzard will peer in France as well as Madrid and have transport between. Therefore, if you peer with them in Madrid, you get an express route to France from there, vs a hairpin back to London and to France from there.

Distance from Lisbon to Paris is around 1400km, which to thumbsuck would be a theoretical 18-20ms (maybe there is no direct/express route as yet)

But potentially then, via Equiano, latency from Cape Town to Paris would be 140ms, vs. the current 160ms. Wacs/London hairpin.

And Madrid has a pretty large exchange.

But as I mentioned small potential, the major actually would be more around redundancy. Less reliant on the London side as an independent gateway into Europe.
 
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@PBCool from what I recall, correct me if I am confused, Cool used to offer some kind of VPN to somewhere to try and get a better gaming connection to another region. Maybe it was Asia? I dont recall
Is that to try and address some of the problems here, so as to not re-route the entire network, but change paths towards a set host/VPN and provide different breakout from there?

It would be an interesting but tough/annoying/expensive idea in a world of unlimited money, to have a "gaming" ASN, and route those users and traffic totally different to "normal" traffic to try and obtain the best possible routes to your gaming nodes, without caring about the burden of some return-path overloads mentioned in this thread.

But, I'm also dumb at BGP, so maybe not.
 
Packet-Kollector said:
@PBCool from what I recall, correct me if I am confused, Cool used to offer some kind of VPN to somewhere to try and get a better gaming connection to another region. Maybe it was Asia? I dont recall
Is that to try and address some of the problems here, so as to not re-route the entire network, but change paths towards a set host/VPN and provide different breakout from there?

It would be an interesting but tough/annoying/expensive idea in a world of unlimited money, to have a "gaming" ASN, and route those users and traffic totally different to "normal" traffic to try and obtain the best possible routes to your gaming nodes, without caring about the burden of some return-path overloads mentioned in this thread.

But, I'm also dumb at BGP, so maybe not.
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Just subscribe to exitlag cost like R60 per month for this... SACS/SAFE all the best routes...
 
PBCool said:
The point is from Portugal to France there are direct terrestrial routes, IE Blizzard will peer in France as well as Madrid and have transport between. Therefore, if you peer with them in Madrid, you get an express route to France from there, vs a hairpin back to London and to France from there.

Madrid is a pretty large exchange.

But as I mentioned small potential, the major actually would be more around redundancy. Less reliant on the London side as an independent gateway into Europe.
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You would have a direct route to France sure but not all servers are in France so a lot of Overwatch is in Amsterdam then you would go Madrid -> France -> Amsterdam where it currently goes UK -> Amsterdam so you gain on France but lose on Amsterdam
 
Packet-Kollector said:
Yeah, something like that exatly, but I think Cool had something setup too free for their users.
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nah its just a VPN in their UK data centre, it breaks a lot of games though since it has a strict NAT, i have it installed i am a CISP user
 
PBCool said:
The point is from Portugal to France there are direct terrestrial routes, IE Blizzard will peer in France as well as Madrid and have transport between. Therefore, if you peer with them in Madrid, you get an express route to France from there, vs a hairpin back to London and to France from there.

Madrid is a pretty large exchange.

But as I mentioned small potential, the major actually would be more around redundancy. Less reliant on the London side as an independent gateway into Europe.
Click to expand...

Okay interesting, I see a lot of gaming networks there. Wonder how they take it from there to wherever the server would be like France or Amsterdam. It might not be favourable and then you going to spend some time playing with reverse path optimizations because I see there are major peers also like Microsoft, Amazon and Google.

Good luck. If it works out well, I need to motivate for it.

Screenshot 2023-03-21 151619.png
 
cavedog said:
Okay interesting, I see a lot of gaming networks there. Wonder how they take it from there to wherever the server would be like France or Amsterdam. It might not be favourable and then you going to spend some time playing with reverse path optimizations because I see there are major peers also like Microsoft, Amazon and Google.

Good luck. If it works out well, I need to motivate for it.

View attachment 1496023
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They would take it with whatever terrestrial is available, same as everywhere else.

The question is the physical path.

But as mentioned, if we turn it up, we would just terminate in London for now.
 
PBCool said:
But potentially then, via Equiano, latency from Cape Town to Paris would be 140ms, vs. the current 160ms.
Click to expand...

I'd be happy with even a 20ms drop to the EU tbh. At one point a week or two ago was getting 147 ms to League of Legends servers, and now it's back up to 160ish. I miss that sub 150 ping :(
 
zolly said:
I'd be happy with even a 20ms drop to the EU tbh. At one point a week or two ago was getting 147 ms to League of Legends servers, and now it's back up to 160ish. I miss that sub 150 ping :(
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LoL servers are based in Amsterdam (EUW) which would be the 147ms and then Germany EUN which the 160 would be so you connecting to Germany now where you were connecting to Amsterdam - thats the difference more than likely
 
Packet-Kollector said:
This has honestly gotta be the best post, context and all, I've ever seen on MyBB.

I will find you, and I will buy you a beer, bish.
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Unfortunately, that COD streaming post is a true story. A true story that became nasty.

She was on our own fibre. Once she realised that we can't dictate to networks how to route their traffic, she left us, told anyone who would listen that we are lower than shark poo and moved to an ISP on the FNO who tried to overbuild us in the estate she lived in. Two other forum ISP reps may have had to do with her before she moved to rain and eventually went to live somewhere else. How do I know this? Our WhatsApp support line is a member of the estate WhatsApp group.

OF, LiveJasmin and Chaterbate "content creators" = no problem. It's a set and forget from our side.
Game streamers = nightmare.
I suspect the first three make a considerable amount more money than the last group.

When in Somerset West, stop by.
 
CrypticZA said:
You would have a direct route to France sure but not all servers are in France so a lot of Overwatch is in Amsterdam then you would go Madrid -> France -> Amsterdam where it currently goes UK -> Amsterdam so you gain on France but lose on Amsterdam
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My guess is that it would be the same as looping in London and then Amsterdam. ~1800km distance between Lisbon and Amsterdam.
 
PBCool said:
My guess is that it would be the same as looping in London and then Amsterdam. ~1800km distance between Lisbon and Amsterdam.
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Openserve peer at Amsterdam and their latency to Blizzard games are pretty bad so thats where i got the idea from
 
CrypticZA said:
Openserve peer at Amsterdam and their latency to Blizzard games are pretty bad so thats where i got the idea from
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It's not about peering locations. Like most transit providers, they use West and East cable systems simultaneously, as it is the most cost-effective way to do so.

The usual model is the West Coast cable system to London and then East Coast cable to Europe, hence the typical increased latency to AMS-IX via Eassy.
 
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Would be nice if Cogent and Liquid can get some capacity. Cogent out of JHB to London has been really good.
 
PBCool said:
It's not about peering locations. Like most transit providers, they use West and East cable systems simultaneously, as it is the most cost-effective way to do so.

The usual model is the West Coast cable system to London and then East Coast cable to Europe, hence the typical increased latency to AMS-IX via Eassy.
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Sorry if this is maybe slightly off topic in this thread but I know you guys mentioned in the CISP thread that you would be getting some east coast capacity to London to improve latency from Durban, do you have an estimation of what latency we might get once this is implemented?

Latency has always been a bit depressing for us on the east coast so any saving would be appreciated. Also more in line with the thread topic I'm curious if 2Africa cable will bring any sort of latency saving from Durban to Europe over existing cables like Seacom and Eassy.
 
The sad truth is the only that will improve our situation is if somebody invents a way to cost effective way to deploy a fibre route that goes through the Sahara.
 
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