What happened to routing?

[smop]

Airtel Fiber seems to hooking to different brands of weed this time around. Consistently degrading routing now.

Tracing route to dns.google [8.8.8.8]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  192.168.0.1
  2    22 ms    21 ms    22 ms  223.177.255.255
  3    22 ms    22 ms    21 ms  182.78.196.49
  4     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  5    60 ms    60 ms    94 ms  142.250.169.206
  6    63 ms    63 ms    62 ms  209.85.251.159
  7    64 ms    63 ms    64 ms  216.239.43.173
  8    63 ms    63 ms    63 ms  dns.google [8.8.8.8]

 

[mayankfawkes]

what is your location ?

 

[smop]

@mayankfawkes West Bengal. Normal range should be in 35-40 ms bracket.

 

[Rhishav]

Airtel has a lot of issues in the Eastern region. Jio and Alliance have better pings in Bengal.

 

[Rickysin]

this happens to me in chandigarh as well. Solution that worked for me is to reconnect pppoe till i get the desired ping.

its not really airtel issue, happens on jio fiber as well. most likely google related issue

 

[smop]

@Rickysin @Rhishav This special treatment is exclusive for Xstream Fiber users only. Class B ISPs like Alliance, Railwire etc using Airtel as their uplink never face this issue. Refreshing PPPoE changes the result by +/- 5 ms.
Honestly, I never had to worry about latency till I landed on having Airtel Fiber. All I wanted was a connection which is reliable during thunderstorms. LCO model (incl. BSNL) couldn't survive the test.
Jio Fiber has stability but comes bundled with loaded latency.

 

[Skye]

@smop True, my local ISP using Airtel as uplink always has 23-24ms and has max +3ms at times. Meanwhile, JioFiber goes from 26ms to 80ms due to their shitty routing here.

 

[Anurag Bhatia]

@Rickysin @Rhishav This special treatment is exclusive for Xstream Fiber users only. Class B ISPs like Alliance, Railwire etc using Airtel as their uplink never face this issue. Refreshing PPPoE changes the result by +/- 5 ms.

and

@smop True, my local ISP using Airtel as uplink always has 23-24ms and has max +3ms at times. Meanwhile, JioFiber goes from 26ms to 80ms due to their shitty routing here.

You are right on that Airtel FTTH shows high latency compared to smaller ISPs using Airtel for upstream. I got Airtel FTTH 6-7 months back as backup and explored this in detail.

There are two primary reasons behind it (specially #2):

1. Airtel has an IP network (with limited locations where there is IP drop) and MPLS network - with cheaper MPLS devices which do not run full routing. MPLS paths are adjusted in overall design and may often not reflect the best geographical path. It's designed based on capacity and other considerations (fibre cut / return traffic on ring).
2. Airtel prefers to route their broadband customers often from state capital because that helps in having centralised caching nodes (of Google, Facebook, Akamai, Netflix etc) as well as other things like CGNAT logging (which requires lot of storage with some redundancy etc). This is not the case for their downstream customers. They do not need to do any CGNAT logging for downstreams.

So e.g in my case I am 70km from Delhi in Haryana and I get 3ms latency to most of content in Noida on my primary (non-Airtel link) while on Airtel it's atleast 15ms as they route everything via Chandigarh/Mohali. My design caching nodes in Chandigarh serve me and MPLS also routes traffic from my city >> 250km > Chandigarh >> 250km Delhi i.e atleast 430km extra on each leg between my city and Delhi.

Try visiting: https://redirector.googlevideo.com/report_mapping?di=no - this will tell you which Google cache node is serving you. Likely you will find capital city or some large city near to your state capital. Try watching a YouTube video, looking at inspect in browser to find out actual caching server serving you. The latency with that server will usually be your minimum latency.

#1 will solve over time (few years) as providers roll out next version of MPLS with more flat/direct routing. #2 will likely stay atleast on IPv4.

 

[Gaurav15]

@Anurag Bhatia Are you from Rohtak? I also get 8ms to Mohali/Chd and 15-20 to NCR. Jio fiber is 8-10 ms to Delhi which seems to be a direct connection.

 

[Anurag Bhatia]

Yes and no 8ms is too high for Delhi. For optical nodes, you can expect 1ms roundtrip per 100Km. So close to 2-3ms is ideal. 8ms again indicates far off travel.