Cool Ideas or UrbanX - Pretoria

[toverseas]

I am new to South Africa and am living in Pretoria. I currently have 1 gig speed through Afrihost and Frogfoot, and even when wired in with a great router my ping sits at 180+ when playing FPS games on European servers (where my friends are). I recently got exitlag and was able to get down to 176-179, but I cannot get lower. I am considering switching to either Cool Ideas or Urban X for this and other reasons.

Which ISP would provide me with the absolute lowest ping possible? Even if it is only a drop to around 160-170.

 

[CrypticZA]

I am new to South Africa and am living in Pretoria. I currently have 1 gig speed through Afrihost and Frogfoot, and even when wired in with a great router my ping sits at 180+ when playing FPS games on European servers (where my friends are). I recently got exitlag and was able to get down to 176-179, but I cannot get lower. I am considering switching to either Cool Ideas or Urban X for this and other reasons.

Which ISP would provide me with the absolute lowest ping possible? Even if it is only a drop to around 160-170.

Cool LG

Cool LG

lg.cisp.co.za

You can use Cool Ideas looking glass to test your IP destination otherwise @CoolEscalator might be able to advise.

It would also depend on where you playing games as the traffic might not be going via the ISP network and the likes of Amazon/Google/Microsoft which is out of the ISP control.

I am in CT and get 141ms to London via CISP. Via their looking glass which is in JHB to one of their test IP's in UK its sitting at 162ms.

 

[CoolEscalator]

Thanks for the @ @CrypticZA

I am new to South Africa and am living in Pretoria. I currently have 1 gig speed through Afrihost and Frogfoot, and even when wired in with a great router my ping sits at 180+ when playing FPS games on European servers (where my friends are). I recently got exitlag and was able to get down to 176-179, but I cannot get lower. I am considering switching to either Cool Ideas or Urban X for this and other reasons.

Which ISP would provide me with the absolute lowest ping possible? Even if it is only a drop to around 160-170.

HI there, ill be happy to help you with some latency numbers on our network, but to be more accurate, would you mind sending me your suburb via PM (unless you want to share it publicly here), so that I can see if we have any customers in the area on Frogfoot I can do testing towards?

Also do you have any examples of Ip's you see the high latency on, that we can compare to?

Looking forward to you response

 

[remoten]

Issue is you are fighting physics now. You've already tried Exitlag and that will be your best bet going forward. Unless you can move down to CPT get a touch lower ping, this is it.

I'm on CISP/MFN 1gb ,
Overwatch latency (I'm also using dropship to force only playing on Amsterdam, Blizzard for some lovely reason like to throw you on Finland and thats 20ms +):


Apex legends in firing range is nice and stable but being Apex its 50/50 on getting decent servers without issues.


CISP will help the best they can on trying route around issues etc. Been with them since 2017, anything wrong they sort it out fast.

 

[PBCool]

Issue is you are fighting physics now. You've already tried Exitlag and that will be your best bet going forward. Unless you can move down to CPT get a touch lower ping, this is it.

I'm on CISP/MFN 1gb ,
Overwatch latency (I'm also using dropship to force only playing on Amsterdam, Blizzard for some lovely reason like to throw you on Finland and thats 20ms +):
View attachment 1935796

Apex legends in firing range is nice and stable but being Apex its 50/50 on getting decent servers without issues.
View attachment 1935798

CISP will help the best they can on trying route around issues etc. Been with them since 2017, anything wrong they sort it out fast.

Hi, and is that the same via the Paratus vpn? It's typically the same latency as Cape Town from Jhb to Lisbon.

 

[CrypticZA]

Hi, and is that the same via the Paratus vpn? It's typically the same latency as Cape Town from Jhb to Lisbon.

Some of the games its annoying they load balance so your rank might be X and there is no quick lobby to throw you in a better region so you go to a nearby region.

I have put myself next to the Apex servers with a VPN and my latency was worse than going via UK. You also start a game and the latency is 180ms but but the time there is like 3 or 4 teams left your latency is 150ms

 

[PBCool]

Some of the games its annoying they load balance so your rank might be X and there is no quick lobby to throw you in a better region so you go to a nearby region.

I have put myself next to the Apex servers with a VPN and my latency was worse than going via UK. You also start a game and the latency is 180ms but but the time there is like 3 or 4 teams left your latency is 150ms

We may be able to do specific pppoes that natively route via Paratus and avoid local peers. Which may be the way around it.

 

[CrypticZA]

We may be able to do specific pppoes that natively route via Paratus and avoid local peers. Which may be the way around it.

What i meant is i created a German VPN and connected to it at 150ms from CT.

Apex server region is Frankfurt and I never got the 150ms.

They do some really weird things, if you play during the day you mostly get low latency but in peak time your latency goes up so I can only think they turn up more servers in peak and it's in another region.

Using AWS network i would often get the lower latency ones vs when using a VPN it would be higher.

They possibly look at your IP and based off its region push you to a server

To get consistent ping in EU region in that game is too much work

 

[PBCool]

What i meant is i created a German VPN and connected to it at 150ms from CT.

Apex server region is Frankfurt and I never got the 150ms.

They do some really weird things, if you play during the day you mostly get low latency but in peak time your latency goes up so I can only think they turn up more servers in peak and it's in another region.

Using AWS network i would often get the lower latency ones vs when using a VPN it would be higher.

They possibly look at your IP and based off its region push you to a server

To get consistent ping in EU region in that game is too much work

Yeah fair enough, I tried to do somw further investigations around AWS and regions and remote peering without luck.

 

[CoolEscalator]

What i meant is i created a German VPN and connected to it at 150ms from CT.

Apex server region is Frankfurt and I never got the 150ms.

They do some really weird things, if you play during the day you mostly get low latency but in peak time your latency goes up so I can only think they turn up more servers in peak and it's in another region.

Using AWS network i would often get the lower latency ones vs when using a VPN it would be higher.

They possibly look at your IP and based off its region push you to a server

To get consistent ping in EU region in that game is too much work

Yeah, when I spent a few months troubleshooting Apex with @_Nyx_Za, we used my AWS account to set up VPNs all over the place:
Spain/Madrid, Singapore, Cape Town, Germany, Paris, Italy, etc. Even as close as the same data centre that Apex was supposedly in. Yet we still had the same issues:
Latency to the VPN endpoint itself was perfect, but in-game latency would still range from 180–220ms.
Sometimes you would get a game at lower latency, and is very stable, other times it's the same weirdness as before.

They seem to have some weird load balancing/routing going on. And for certain aspects of the game, like healing, shields,etc, it seems like different interactions can involve different routes or infrastructure. That can cause game desyncs, which would explain why everything can feel completely fine until you're healing, switching items, or about to fight someone.

Those individual interactions seem to be processed/handled differently, and if there's any delay or routing issue with that part of the game state, you start getting desyncs, hit-reg issues, lag, etc.

All allegedly that is but from what I've heard, it was not this bad before they switched to AWS, as I believe the previous servers were in Ireland if I'm not mistaken.

 

[CrypticZA]

Yeah, when I spent a few months troubleshooting Apex with @_Nyx_Za, we used my AWS account to set up VPNs all over the place:
Spain/Madrid, Singapore, Cape Town, Germany, Paris, Italy, etc. Even as close as the same data centre that Apex was supposedly in. Yet we still had the same issues:
Latency to the VPN endpoint itself was perfect, but in-game latency would still range from 180–220ms.
Sometimes you would get a game at lower latency, and is very stable, other times it's the same weirdness as before.

They seem to have some weird load balancing/routing going on. And for certain aspects of the game, like healing, shields,etc, it seems like different interactions can involve different routes or infrastructure. That can cause game desyncs, which would explain why everything can feel completely fine until you're healing, switching items, or about to fight someone.

Those individual interactions seem to be processed/handled differently, and if there's any delay or routing issue with that part of the game state, you start getting desyncs, hit-reg issues, lag, etc.

All allegedly that is but from what I've heard, it was not this bad before they switched to AWS, as I believe the previous servers were in Ireland if I'm not mistaken.

Previously you could select a region to play in so they had

London - independent host
Amsterdam - independent host
AWS Frankfurt 1/2
Google Belgium 1/2

For most cases you got whatver you chose but sometimes were routed to a different one.

I have played Apex from season 1 on and off and severs have never been the best but recently they have been probably the most stable. Back in the day funny enough i always use to play on AWS though

 

[CoolEscalator]

Previously you could select a region to play in so they had

London - independent host
Amsterdam - independent host
AWS Frankfurt 1/2
Google Belgium 1/2

For most cases you got whatver you chose but sometimes were routed to a different one.

I have played Apex from season 1 on and off and severs have never been the best but recently they have been probably the most stable. Back in the day funny enough i always use to play on AWS though

Ah yes, Amsterdam I was thinking about. Not Ireland, thanks.

But yeah. I can agree that I haven't seen many reports as of late about Apex, so I do hope they are constantly improving on things. As troubleshooting Apex is always such a rabithole, and difficult to diagnose.