What undersea cable does my ISP use?

[Lashie130]

Hi There My BB Reader

So I couldn’t actually find anything online about which undersea cables ISP’s use.

This is simply for educational purposes for myself. From what I can tell as per This site, we have 9 undersea cables connected to South Africa. 2 of those 9 to be completed in 2023.

I was just curious does each ISP use all available cables for connections or are specific cables chosen for an ISP to connect to? With an ISP using a specific cable or cables, how would we as users know what is being used? Are we entitled to that information as users?

As an example if my ISP is using SAT-3/WASC does that mean my latency to Spain and Portugal game servers would be better than an ISP that doesn’t use that cable?

Again it is simply for informative purposes for myself as I could not find anything online in this regard and my knowledge is 0 on the subject. Would you favour an ISP using specific cables or is it all the same in the end?

 

[LeSaint]

Hello,

To directly answer your question, no, all ISP's do not use every cable and every path, as nice as that would be it would just be too expensive.

Not even the big players do. They may have more paths across multiple cables but not every one.

Most ISP's will buy a primary path, to Europe, on the West coast route, shorter path -+13,00km, lower latency, and a backup path, to Europe, on the East coast, longer path +- 15,000km, increased latency.

You will never really know what path they use other than checking the latency, i.e 160-170ms (to Europe) will be west coast and 180-190ms (to Europe) will be east coast.

You also have the seacom path via Asia and the SACS path via South America to the USA.

As to your example, yes if your ISP is using SAT3/WACS and the other is not, then your gaming experience will be better over some one who does not as their path will be longer (higher latency).

Company information is generally proprietary so the company does *NOT* have to tell you, so my opinion here is, no you are not entitled to it but you are always welcome to ask, it is no big secret and most people with some technical skill can figure it out easily enough.

Most, if not all gamers make there decision based on the paths and effort ISP's put into path decisions as they take their gaming seriously and, in the same vein, most ISP's (decent ones anyway) take the cable and path decision very seriously.

Hope this helps.

PS Remember that ISP's are there to supply all consumers, not only the gaming community.
... and as you said there are only 9 cables, but if you look at the map, 5 cables go West and 3 go East and up to the Med, so there are 8 of your 9, realistically there are only two routes.

 

[Lashie130]

Hello,

To directly answer your question, no, all ISP's do not use every cable and every path, as nice as that would be it would just be too expensive.

Not even the big players do. They may have more paths across multiple cables but not every one.

Most ISP's will buy a primary path, to Europe, on the West coast route, shorter path -+13,00km, lower latency, and a backup path, to Europe, on the East coast, longer path +- 15,000km, increased latency.

You will never really know what path they use other than checking the latency, i.e 160-170ms (to Europe) will be west coast and 180-190ms (to Europe) will be east coast.

You also have the seacom path via Asia and the SACS path via South America to the USA.

As to your example, yes if your ISP is using SAT3/WACS and the other is not, then your gaming experience will be better over some one who does not as their path will be longer (higher latency).

Company information is generally proprietary so the company does *NOT* have to tell you, so my opinion here is, no you are not entitled to it but you are always welcome to ask, it is no big secret and most people with some technical skill can figure it out easily enough.

Most, if not all gamers make there decision based on the paths and effort ISP's put into path decisions as they take their gaming seriously and, in the same vein, most ISP's (decent ones anyway) take the cable and path decision very seriously.

Hope this helps.

PS Remember that ISP's are there to supply all consumers, not only the gaming community.
... and as you said there are only 9 cables, but if you look at the map, 5 cables go West and 3 go East and up to the Med, so there are 8 of your 9, realistically there are only two routes.

Well this has been a real eye opener. Thank you for the input, truly do appreciate it.

I didn’t take my ISP undersea cable route into account at all when deciding my ISP but definitely will consider this moving forward.

Yeah my post was a bit one sided due to me only thinking from a gamers perspective I honestly didn’t take other traffic needs into account.

Thank you again for the feedback.

 

[PBCool]

Typically ISPs get transit locally, from those that have pops overseas.

But basically traffic is simply load balanced via multiple cables, so you may have great latency to certain hosts and not so great to others BGP depending.

We run active passive so everything over WACs and an East Coast cable as our fail over. That way you typically have the best latency to Europe/UK.

We were the first ISP to turn up SACs but it's realistically too complicated to manage efficiently.

SAFE is via Mauritius and then lands in Asia, guys typically pickup traffic in Singapore via SAFE.