Australia to Europe.. latency

Woody_FX

Woody_FX

Woody_FX

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Joined
13 Jul 2005
Posts
165
Hi guys :)

I'm out in Australia messing about and during my down times i play some Warcraft on Europe servers. If i ping some europe IP address it give me a time of about 372ms on average.

If i do a tracert it seems to connect back to europe through San Francisco rather than across asia which i though would be a better/shorter route. Maybe not i know little about these things.

Anybody able to give some tips advice on bringing down the latency? Any tricks for this?

Using a tunnel from lowerping which helps a little i guess for the wow connection.

Many thanks-
Woody
 
If you're using Lowerping to tunnel your WoW traffic and disable nagling (that's what they do AFAIK), I'm not sure there's anything else you can do short of physically moving closer to the server.
 
Oh noes!

So pretty much all ISP's route the same way back to europe? And there are no 'special' one that use a real good backbone that zings all the way to europe faster that the speed of light etc etc

Looks like its time for me to retire my gaming and read some books!
 
All the ISP's there will use a limited number of carriers to provide their international transit. Who uses who and how well they perform is probably better asked on an Australian site, maybe try somewhere like whirlpool.net.au

Also bear in mind that doing a tracert won't necessarily show you the route your WoW traffic takes, since you're using a Lowerping proxy to route that traffic. Obviously make sure you're using one of their European proxies if you're playing on EU WoW servers.
 
Virtually no fibre capacity across Asia at all, so through the US is the way it goes. To be honest you won't do much better, physics alone means you won't do any better than 100ms or so, that's without equipment in the path so 300ms is about the best.

I've just tested through our fastpath to Australia (we pay for a optimised path as we have some customers with substantial presence down there) and I'm seeing 264ms
 
bigredshark said:
Virtually no fibre capacity across Asia at all, so through the US is the way it goes. To be honest you won't do much better, physics alone means you won't do any better than 100ms or so, that's without equipment in the path so 300ms is about the best.
Click to expand...

This is complete nonsense as nearly all backhaul is over fibre now and even signals over copper travel at the speed of light. Many Asian countries have good external connectivity although much of it is privately owned, particularly Russia, India, Japan, South Korea, China, Singapore and Thailand.

Asian networks tend to only spew out Spam and fraud which is why Oz ISPs are not jumping to peer with them.
 
sparkey196 said:
This is complete nonsense as nearly all backhaul is over fibre now and even signals over copper travel at the speed of light. Many Asian countries have good external connectivity although much of it is privately owned, particularly Russia, India, Japan, South Korea, China, Singapore and Thailand.

Asian networks tend to only spew out Spam and fraud which is why Oz ISPs are not jumping to peer with them.
Click to expand...

No, it's far from nonsense, trans pacific capacity far outstrips any capacity through asia, witness the problems caused for india and the subcontinent by a couple of cable faults in the last few months.

As this map (http://www.telegeography.com/products/map_cable/images/Cable_Map.gif) shows, capacity through the middle east to asia is pitifully small (not least because in addition to there being more cables trans-pacific, they're also higher bandwidth systems).

You also need to study basic maths, even if the traffic travelled at the speed of light (it doesn't, it passes through routers along the way which take time to process traffic, optical switching isn't happening yet), it's around 17,000km to australia from the UK. The speed of light is 3x10∧8, which means in a straight line it takes 0.057 seconds for light to cover that distance, which is 57ms, routed by the US the distance increases by at least half, which takes you to...100ms.

So, when I said physics limited you to 100ms at best, turns out I was right.

And electricity doesn't travel at the speed of light, in a bare, pure copper, conductor propagation occurs at around 96% the speed of light. In a coaxial cable (which all of the very few remaining copper under sea cables are) the propagation occurs at around 65% the speed of light. So no, it doesn't travel at the speed of light, learn some physics once you're done with the maths.

Also virtually all intercontinental backhaul is privately owned. Asian networks tend to have less peering with places like australia because there's no good reason for vast interconnects, there being a language barrier which makes most of the content irrelevant for most users.

Try knowing something about the subject before you call people's reply's rubbish next time.
 
Sorry I misunderstood your first point, I thought when you said there is no fibre across Asia that you meant Asian countries are a bunch of backward hicks with tin cans and string. What you meant is that traffic leaving Oz is mostly trans pacific which is natural considering the technical and political problems of going through Asia. It is hard for any Australian ISP to put together a business case for connecting to any country other than the US at this time.

Where did you get that figure of 65% from? I understood it was much more negligible than that - like 90+%.
 
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