Hi
Im seeing high latencies to Seacom. Not sure if there's still peering issues? 40ms from Honeydew to City Deep. Used to be around 2ms on my previous provider. Also seeing 2% loss on this link.
Same issue from Pretoria (Montana) to City Deep. +40ms. No loss though.
Below is from Honeydew.
View attachment 1776896
Please assist.
All me WebSquad sites seems to have high latency to Seacom.
Seems to be routing through CPT on Seacom’s side? Could you assist by any chance? Not sure if you have can ask their NOC?
TL;DR: Seacom's restrictive peering policy is to blame for this issue. At this point there is no workaround for latency, but there is for the packet loss. Please DM me IP Details so I can investigate and get that sorted.
Full explanation: This is what it looks like when a network deliberately de-peers ISPs at the Internet exchanges (NAP and INX-ZA) in the name of "business". Basically Seacom decided that -to reach their own eyeball prefixes (seacom IPs), ISPs would need to pay for Seacom IP transit, or pick up traffic in the EU, or cobble together a workaround.
They did this under the pretense that ISPs were unfairly carrying traffic over their network to their clients (who pay for Seacom services)- a somewhat flawed argument. Their strategy is that their own clients will blame other ISPs rather than the "mighty seacom"- And in fairness its a strategy that's largely worked. To be clear- Seacom is the only business that also happens to be a retail ISP (eyeball IPs) who've gone this route in recent history - we can reach any other prefix in SA directly at the closest exchange (500+ networks and counting).
Web sQuad remains one of the top peered local networks in SA with presence at all 6 south African exchanges, which means we carry all our own traffic nationally, however Seacom favour their "policy"
profits. We have transit vendor out of CPT with a Seacom and BICS upstream - however that means all Seacom bound forward and reverse traffic can only traverse that route as the closest point. Seacom also refuse to peer with any of the larger, more established global T1 upstreams with a presence in SA whom we've favoured for their improved international connectivity. Essentially there are many more actual T1 networks with capacity on every submarine cable (including seacom's own), with better international presence and reach.
Now the packet loss you're seeing is definitely an issue, and accentuated by the latency- and this can be fixed. Let me get that bit sorted for you- have you logged a ticket for this? Can you pm me the IP you're trying to reach and I'll get onto it.
It's up to Seacom's own clients to put pressure on them to reach non-seacom networks locally. And we ask this humbly, please put pressure on them. You're paying top dollar for a service and it's their job to deliver your traffic as best as possible (which is why peering and exchanges exist). We've tried for 4 years now to argue that their eyeball IPs should be accessible at the exchange, and that we don't care about their transit prefixes (though they should). They see $$. We truly believe that their transit is not worth the spend (not in terms of quality (it's neither better nor necessarily worse than other options), support, uptime, latency and reach for our client base- who choose us because we are passionate about building a great network) merely to reach an IP that's sitting on an exchange at Teraco but inaccessible.
