Afrihost Gaming PPTP [alpha]

[Soul Assassin]

I see my account works now, Openserve.

 

[ronnie_94]

I see my account works now, Openserve.

Not for me but I think its cos I have some weird fault going on at the moment being routed via CPT and my static IP address changed for some odd reason. @Afrigirl

 

[AfriNatic]

I see my account works now, Openserve.

Yes it's fixed for Openserve and Vodacom clients. Hoping to get the KZN PPTP server up this week.

 

[AfriNatic]

Not for me but I think its cos I have some weird fault going on at the moment being routed via CPT and my static IP address changed for some odd reason. @Afrigirl

Let me check what is going on.

 

[Polymathic]

Yes it's fixed for Openserve and Vodacom clients. Hoping to get the KZN PPTP server up this week.

Is this just for PC gaming or is there a way for console gamers to take advantage of this?

 

[AfriNatic]

Is this just for PC gaming or is there a way for console gamers to take advantage of this?

Using it in the router would be the best way to achieve this. The limit is about 100Mbps now but it might not be ideal.

 

[giggity]

I'm on OpenServe in Pretoria.

Unfortunately, I haven't seen improvement in League of Legends gaming performance. Below are a few servers I connected to and their corresponding latency in-game:

• 162.249.77.20 208ms
• 162.249.78.219 183ms
• 162.249.77.125 200ms
• 162.249.78.35 200ms
• 162.249.77.223 200ms
• 162.249.77.172 203ms
• 162.249.78.142 193ms
• 162.249.78.202 182ms

Some of these might have been with PPTP off. Either way, some games disabling the PPTP connection would reduce the latency from 200ms+ to ±180ms.

 

[ronnie_94]

I'm on OpenServe in Pretoria.

Unfortunately, I haven't seen improvement in League of Legends gaming performance. Below are a few servers I connected to and their corresponding latency in-game:

• 162.249.77.20 208ms
• 162.249.78.219 183ms
• 162.249.77.125 200ms
• 162.249.78.35 200ms
• 162.249.77.223 200ms
• 162.249.77.172 203ms
• 162.249.78.142 193ms
• 162.249.78.202 182ms

Some of these might have been with PPTP off. Either way, some games disabling the PPTP connection would reduce the latency from 200ms+ to ±180ms.

Same experience here but as per @AfriNatic he said it is just the start of the project and what he is thinking is they can tweak it a bit more on the network side but only once they have all the kinks worked out.

 

[2525252525]

I'm working with the network engineers on deploying pptp vpn servers in CPT (first) and then DUR and JHB later on as a trial for gamers on the Afrihost network that are experiencing less than-ideal routing from the northern region.

I took all the complaints to heart and hope we can come up with a solution that can work for gamers and for clients that just want to download as fast and as much as they want.

We starting with a CPT PPtP server hosting in our CPT core to force routing to Europe via West Coast cables without having to make major network changes that could impact other services as well as pricing. Below are the details for clients that want to give it a go.

Server : 169.1.2.37
username and password from clientzone (pppoe details)

make sure to enable pap as the authentication method.

View attachment 1514285

This project has only just started and we appreciate any feedback.

We have limited speeds via pptp to 10Mbps as a start. We will look at how we can improve this and how popular it is. We chose pptp as it's unencrypted for speed and because it already integrates with what we have built in clientzone for password resets. PPtP is also supported in the Huawei router we supply.

Afrihost pptp3 [BETA!]

If you are enabling it in the router please make sure you are aware of the 10Mbps speed cap for now.

View attachment 1514289

Fantastic initiative, good job, guys.

On OpenServe, Starcraft 2 / World of Warcraft (Activision-Blizzard) servers still return 200ms though.

Europe

185.60.112.157 185.60.112.158 185.60.114.159

Blizzard Support - Running a Pathping

 

[giggity]

Same experience here but as per @AfriNatic he said it is just the start of the project and what he is thinking is they can tweak it a bit more on the network side but only once they have all the kinks worked out.

100% just leaving feedback with some (hopefully useful) info.

 

[2525252525]

I just gave this a quick try using Dota 2. My normal latency without using the VPN looks like this:

Using the Afrihost VPN things get worse, even within SA, but I suspect that's because I am in KZN and there isn't a Durban server yet.

Lastly I also included an ExitLag result because it is able to bring the latency to SE Asia down to 128ms. I think it does this by routing the traffic to SEA via Singapore. So this might be worth investigating as I know there are a lot of people who would like to play ranked Dota 2 in South Africa and this would provide the best latency to do so.

I got ExitLag and tried out Starcraft 2 - Americas client and selected Singapore, 130ms! insane! I teared up, in 13 years this is the first time Starcraft 2 is properly playable.

 

[2525252525]

So Exitlag uses various VPS servers hosted on multiple networks that they chain up to provide low latency.

With networking this setup is not possible and let me briefly explain why.

The internet is basically a bunch of networks all connecting to each other. Not everyone is in every IXP (exchange point or data centre) and they can buy what is called ip transit from tier 1 providers to take their traffic to certain parts or the internat as a whole.

Let's say ISP A has a direct link to London which gives 160ms from JHB. To reach a server in France they have a second "pop" in Amsterdam which they connect to first then send the traffic over Cogent to reach France because they don't have any links to France. This causes latency to France to be 195ms on ISP A.

ISP B has a direct link to France from JHB which gives a latency of 165ms but to reach Londoin they go via Germany which gives 195ms to London.

Exitlag basically gets a VPS on both of these networks and get a VPS in London and France and changes which route is used by chaining the respective VPS's

BGP for networks doesn't work like this. There are extra costs involved even if you have all the routes it doesn't mean that the network in France that is hosting the gaming server sends traffic back to you via France they might want to send traffic back to you via Amsterdam and so all of these factors make it difficult to steer traffic.

Our brothers in blue (Cool Ideas) get this sorted because they have a direct transit link to London which they then peer with other networks at LINX and reach the rest of the internet via Cogent from London which basically forces traffic JHB >< CPT <> LON whereas with Afrihost we have transit providers in SA. This means they can use whichever route makes sense based on traffic and outages and not always the lowest latency routes.

Exitlag has at least 6 networks in South Africa that I could see. i3d, CDN77 (Angola Cables), ECN, Cloudflare, Vultr

The CDN77 uses Angola Cables. Low latency to Angola and Brazil but 210ms to London. You can test this with Mulvad vpn which I also tested to get an idea of how CDN routes traffic from SA.
Vultr uses SAFE via China Mobile so they have low-latency routes to Singapore and Hong Kong but again 200ms to London
i3d has low latency routes to Singapore and London and ECN also has a low latency route to London.

Hope this long message gives some clarity on how they manipulate traffic by using a bunch of networks to get favourable routes.

You guys should maybe invest in a Afrihost VPS in Singapore? Blizzard servers, Dota etc, everything over there at 130ms, supremely playable vs regular links to EU etc. I'm fine paying the fee for ExitLag but I think a lot of Afrihost gamers could benefit from this.

 

[AfriNatic]

Afrihost Cape Town PPTP | pptp.afrihost.capetown | 169.1.2.37

Afrihost Durban PPTP | pptp.afrihost.durban | 169.1.3.19

Will see if we can find low latency routes with our providers that we have an use these IP's with bgp communities to steer traffic. Durban is live as of 17:00 btw

 

[Soul Assassin]

Afrihost Cape Town PPTP | pptp.afrihost.capetown | 169.1.2.37

Afrihost Durban PPTP | pptp.afrihost.durban | 169.1.3.19

Will see if we can find low latency routes with our providers that we have an use these IP's with bgp communities to steer traffic. Durban is live as of 17:00 btw

So Cape Town goes England and then across to Amsterdam and Durban goes up to France right?

 

[William1102]

Afrihost Cape Town PPTP | pptp.afrihost.capetown | 169.1.2.37

Afrihost Durban PPTP | pptp.afrihost.durban | 169.1.3.19

Will see if we can find low latency routes with our providers that we have an use these IP's with bgp communities to steer traffic. Durban is live as of 17:00 btw

I’m guessing for someone already in Durban these won’t make any difference ?

 

[AfriNatic]

So Cape Town goes England and then across to Amsterdam and Durban goes up to France right?

Not necessarily. So from CPT and DUR we have Openserve and Liquid Telecoms transit. The forward path is Openserve at both but the return paths can be either. This can cause an issue where the return path is via Liquid Telecoms and that traffic will hairpin JHB.

The goal is to get the PPTP server up see where they win and where their fail and see if we can find the best transit provider between the 2 and announce the /32 exclusively to that transit provider. This is a goal so we will see what we can engineer.

The problem is that not all transit providers accept a /32 unless your AS is a direct customer of theirs in which case we are not it's via EchoSP so I will see what we can do here.

I think Openserve exclusively from DUR (because of SAFE for Asia routes) and Liquid Telecoms exclusively from CPT can be the best options but will work on refining it a bit.

I’m guessing for someone already in Durban these won’t make any difference ?

Once we can find a good combo on the network side it might still be worth it as you could use a different route via the pptp server vs direct.

 

[AfriNatic]

So Cape Town goes England and then across to Amsterdam and Durban goes up to France right?

Another Goal is to get a JHB pptp server set up and remove cogent forward path and see if Liquid or Openserve is better from JHB to EU or if using Cogent Exclusively for egress and revers is better. Currently, it's a mix of Cogent, Openserve and Liquid.

 

[n1ckna5]

I haven't tested but holy moly I hope this works and is available fast because this 195ms is pure fibre pain .

 

[William1102]

Not necessarily. So from CPT and DUR we have Openserve and Liquid Telecoms transit. The forward path is Openserve at both but the return paths can be either. This can cause an issue where the return path is via Liquid Telecoms and that traffic will hairpin JHB.

The goal is to get the PPTP server up see where they win and where their fail and see if we can find the best transit provider between the 2 and announce the /32 exclusively to that transit provider. This is a goal so we will see what we can engineer.

The problem is that not all transit providers accept a /32 unless your AS is a direct customer of theirs in which case we are not it's via EchoSP so I will see what we can do here.

I think Openserve exclusively from DUR (because of SAFE for Asia routes) and Liquid Telecoms exclusively from CPT can be the best options but will work on refining it a bit.



Once we can find a good combo on the network side it might still be worth it as you could use a different route via the pptp server vs direct.

Thanks Afrinatic

Appreciate the Effort in deploying something for gamers not every isp is willing to adjust routes etc for better latency

SAFE would be a game changer in terms of latency 130ms to Singapore while we have Middle East 120-130ms from Durban not many games have servers in ME

 

[AfriNatic]

I haven't tested but holy moly I hope this works and is available fast because this 195ms is pure fibre pain .

Let me rather post on my rep account.

Yes the goal and my vision for this project is that you add all 3 regions, and each region has its advantage in terms of latency. You can just click from the quick connect to switch regions.