6 ms·

Yes. It's all well and good having gigabit+ connections, but latency is the killer. Here in Perth, Western Australia we are very far from everything. In the 90

Yes. It's all well and good having gigabit+ connections, but latency is the killer. Here in Perth, Western Australia we are very far from everything. In the 90s/early 2000's our routing and latency was pretty terrible, especially over dialup and slow connections and that's how I thought online gaming was (300ms+++). When there started to be "local" servers in Adelaide (thanks Internode!) and Sydney, this went down to 25-30ms for adelaide and 50ms for Sydney. Now we have undersea cables to Singapore from Perth, so we actually get 2ms lower latency from PER->SNG than PER->SYD! Sometimes I get weird routing through Asia if a service determines I'm better suited for that. There is apparently also a cable from PER->Europe now, where we now get less latency to EU (it's now less than US, crazy).

djhn 4y ago
Out of curiosity, what kind of ping do you have now in absolute terms? I think mine is in the region of 1-2ms (Europe), but I do remember having double digit ping.
- thejosh 4y ago
  I have FTTP, so I get ~1ms-2ms to my ISP.
- djhn 4y ago
  * to local servers. Now that I've tried out blip on a 4g LTE connection it's around 50.
- adamcharnock 4y ago
  Side note: if you want to get a ballpark for one way latency, just measure the approximate distance of the undersea cable on Google Maps (in km) and divide by 155. That will give latency (in ms) to +/-10%, excluding any additional last-mile latency (Wi-Fi etc)
aussieshibe 4y ago
It's a shame Internode went the way it did after iiNet/TPG took over. Old Node was one of those rare companies where I actually believed they put their customers and employees before their bottom line. It's just TPG with different branding now. (by the way, has anyone seen my orange watch?)
- thejosh 4y ago
  Yep, it's such a shame. Internode was great. Now that goes to AussieBroadband, their employees are great and their communication via whingepool is great. We'll see how being public keeps this up..
  - aussieshibe 4y ago
    For sure, AussieBroadband are (sample size of one) fantastic. I particularly like that they've exposed some of the NBN troubleshooting tools to customers. They also skipped over that "we'll provision more CVC capacity when we see it flatline for at least four hours a day" phase that most other retailers seemed to go through. They don't quite have the same old school nerd appeal that Node had though. Things like free Usenet, games.on.net, unmetered downloads from the fairly well stocked mirror..
triggercut 4y ago
>Sometimes I get weird routing through Asia if a service determines I'm better suited for that. It's a mix of traffic, peering agreements between providers* and QoS rules on the routers you hop through along the way. After your request leaves your ISPs hardware often you have no choice where it goes next. Something that wasn't mentioned was that this is why traders will pay millions to set up servers in DCs/IXs all the way between them and the market so they have more control over the route their traffic takes. Sometimes even running their own cables. SEA-ME-WE-3, the cable you were talking about was the only game in town for that side of the country until about 4 years ago when ASC came online. ASC has over 10 times the capacity (60Tbit/s) of SEA-ME-WE-3 which was below 1 Tbit/s until 2009 and is not only 4.6 Tbit/s according to wiki. It's worth noting that SEA-ME-WE-3 is administered by Singtel there are 90+ other investors (who were all getting preference or had capacity agreements at launch). * this is complicated, someone feel free to correct/expand but essentially carriers will lease capacity over particular connections and sometimes the agreements between two carriers will mean particular customers traffic may get preference, so on busy lines, businesses paying for higher SLAs get prefered over regular consumers who might shunted off to a lower grade connection where there's space. There's a great example with NTT's partnership with Formula 1 where NTT engineers go in before race day to location making sure all that incredible Digital Twin data is getting fed back-to-base to manufacturer's HQs in the UK or Germany etc. as fast as possible. Sure there's the pit crew, but there's a whole team back home who are watching and analysing data and relaying advice. F1 is really an incredible technical feat in more ways than just the cars.
867-5309 4y ago
>Sometimes I get weird routing through Asia if a service determines I'm better suited for that. There is apparently also a cable from PER->Europe now, where we now get less latency to EU (it's now less than US, crazy). strangely I found the same was true for reliable video streaming from NZ to UK instead of Auckland > Sydney > California > New York > London, the optimal path undoubtedly proved to be Auckland > Sydney > Singapore > NoMansLand > London traversing America introduces all sorts of problems, I'm guessing due to deep packet inspection rather than distance
- hyperionplays 4y ago
  Probably more that most T1's in america don't peer so you end up going over HE/Cogent which is congested.

djhn 4y ago

Out of curiosity, what kind of ping do you have now in absolute terms? I think mine is in the region of 1-2ms (Europe), but I do remember having double digit ping.

thejosh 4y ago
I have FTTP, so I get ~1ms-2ms to my ISP.
djhn 4y ago
* to local servers. Now that I've tried out blip on a 4g LTE connection it's around 50.
adamcharnock 4y ago
Side note: if you want to get a ballpark for one way latency, just measure the approximate distance of the undersea cable on Google Maps (in km) and divide by 155. That will give latency (in ms) to +/-10%, excluding any additional last-mile latency (Wi-Fi etc)

aussieshibe 4y ago

It's a shame Internode went the way it did after iiNet/TPG took over. Old Node was one of those rare companies where I actually believed they put their customers and employees before their bottom line. It's just TPG with different branding now. (by the way, has anyone seen my orange watch?)

thejosh 4y ago
Yep, it's such a shame. Internode was great. Now that goes to AussieBroadband, their employees are great and their communication via whingepool is great. We'll see how being public keeps this up..
- aussieshibe 4y ago
  For sure, AussieBroadband are (sample size of one) fantastic. I particularly like that they've exposed some of the NBN troubleshooting tools to customers. They also skipped over that "we'll provision more CVC capacity when we see it flatline for at least four hours a day" phase that most other retailers seemed to go through. They don't quite have the same old school nerd appeal that Node had though. Things like free Usenet, games.on.net, unmetered downloads from the fairly well stocked mirror..

triggercut 4y ago

>Sometimes I get weird routing through Asia if a service determines I'm better suited for that. It's a mix of traffic, peering agreements between providers* and QoS rules on the routers you hop through along the way. After your request leaves your ISPs hardware often you have no choice where it goes next. Something that wasn't mentioned was that this is why traders will pay millions to set up servers in DCs/IXs all the way between them and the market so they have more control over the route their traffic takes. Sometimes even running their own cables. SEA-ME-WE-3, the cable you were talking about was the only game in town for that side of the country until about 4 years ago when ASC came online. ASC has over 10 times the capacity (60Tbit/s) of SEA-ME-WE-3 which was below 1 Tbit/s until 2009 and is not only 4.6 Tbit/s according to wiki. It's worth noting that SEA-ME-WE-3 is administered by Singtel there are 90+ other investors (who were all getting preference or had capacity agreements at launch). * this is complicated, someone feel free to correct/expand but essentially carriers will lease capacity over particular connections and sometimes the agreements between two carriers will mean particular customers traffic may get preference, so on busy lines, businesses paying for higher SLAs get prefered over regular consumers who might shunted off to a lower grade connection where there's space. There's a great example with NTT's partnership with Formula 1 where NTT engineers go in before race day to location making sure all that incredible Digital Twin data is getting fed back-to-base to manufacturer's HQs in the UK or Germany etc. as fast as possible. Sure there's the pit crew, but there's a whole team back home who are watching and analysing data and relaying advice. F1 is really an incredible technical feat in more ways than just the cars.

867-5309 4y ago

>Sometimes I get weird routing through Asia if a service determines I'm better suited for that. There is apparently also a cable from PER->Europe now, where we now get less latency to EU (it's now less than US, crazy). strangely I found the same was true for reliable video streaming from NZ to UK instead of Auckland > Sydney > California > New York > London, the optimal path undoubtedly proved to be Auckland > Sydney > Singapore > NoMansLand > London traversing America introduces all sorts of problems, I'm guessing due to deep packet inspection rather than distance

hyperionplays 4y ago
Probably more that most T1's in america don't peer so you end up going over HE/Cogent which is congested.