@MeanMachine
The best latency to Europe I’ve ever seen was in Maharashtra, using Microscan with
Tata (AS4755) as the upstream, which is likely due to the proximity to major gateways and undersea cable landing points.
The current situation in Kerala is not great, as most ISPs here use either Airtel (AS9498) or Tata (AS4755) as their upstream. From my experience, ISPs using Airtel upstream have significantly worse latency to Europe compared to those using Tata upstream. I’ve also noticed inconsistent routing paths among ISPs using Airtel upstream. What’s even stranger is that when I tested a
DigitalOcean Bangalore
VPS connected via WireGuard
VPN, even though DigitalOcean also uses Airtel as an upstream, its routing to the same European destinations was completely different and noticeably better than what local ISPs using Airtel provide.
ISPs in Kerala that use Tata upstream are average overall but still better than Airtel-based ISPs, typically providing around 130–150 ms latency to Europe. Currently, I’m using RailWire, which uses Jio for both inbound and outbound traffic, but it suffers from serious issues during peak hours between 8 PM and 12 AM, when latency spikes heavily. RailWire also changed its IPv6 inbound routing to Airtel; previously it was Jio, and IPv6 latency to Europe was excellent at that time. Another odd behavior I’ve noticed is that
Google and YouTube traffic over IPv6 is being served from Bangalore, while over IPv4 it is being served from Kochi, which likely contributes to inconsistent performance.
Additionally, BSNL has recently introduced CGNAT in Kerala, and I’m currently on it. When CGNAT was first implemented, the connection was actually more stable than the earlier dynamic public IP setup, but performance has degraded since then. BSNL changed inbound routing to SLT for most Tier-1 paths, and when I raised this issue with several senior management contacts, many of them were unfamiliar with concepts such as Tier-1 routing or CGNAT. I then escalated the issue directly to the BLR NOC of NIB, after which they changed inbound routing for AS1299 to Jio while keeping inbound routing for other Tier-1 networks via AS9498 (Airtel). Despite these changes, latency on BSNL is currently very poor.
BSNL also stated that they cannot implement symmetric inbound and outbound routing. Their response was, “Dear customer, analysis is done by BSNL bandwidth management and attached log shows all latency is looking normal. BM team reply: ‘In Internet no one make symmetric traffic, IN/OUT packets always follow different path for incoming/outgoing traffic.’” What makes this particularly frustrating is that when I requested symmetric inbound and outbound routing from the RailWire team, they implemented it without any issues or hesitation
