I’m not sure if this is where I should be posting this question or if it’s the right type of question to ask here but here goes. I posted it on network engineering but someone told me to come here.
I’m from Singapore and my ISP is called SingTel. It’s was the national utility company back in the day. Anyway, we have like 5 alternatives here now and all of them have a basic 1 gbps fibre plan. Usually I have no complaints. But, I am a gamer and I notice the smallest lag. When I run speed tests to the local server of course you can see that we get the standard 950-1000mbps. The problems come when they route
Last year when I was playing rainbow 6 siege I got pings of 1-10ms, the South East Asia siege servers are located in Asia and hosted by Microsoft. One day last year, when I was playing siege with my friends (who are on the other ISPs and we are all on 1 gbps fibre plans), I noticed that I was getting 100-150ms pings and disconnecting a lot, while all my friends were getting 1-10 on their other ISPs. I went online on reddit and found other people on SingTel were having this issue as well. So I checked what IP addresses I was connecting to, ran traceroutes from my internet connection and my friends’ connections.
Here is an example, this was the siege server that was affected last year. https://www.whatismyip.com/13.76.159.75/ , located in Singapore, run by microsoft. This was the traceroute from my ISP SingTel before the fix https://imgur.com/a/KtUTFYu. These are screenshots of my friends all from different ISPs tracerouting to the same server, https://imgur.com/a/NBYqH0f.
You can see the difference, I found out that my ISP was bouncing the connection to Hong Kong and back to Singapore while the rest of them were connecting directly to the servers in Singapore (hence the lag). So I went to my ISPs tech support and after a few weeks of complaining and showing them the proof, they finally re-routed the traffic.
Now the same thing is happening with modern warfare. Here is my post https://www.reddit.com/r/singapore/comments/gc4v1a/modern_warfare_lagging_on_singtel_1gbps_repost/ , and it seems to be affecting everyone on my ISP.
Now I’m getting people coming to me from other games and services (diablo, siege again, dota, csgo, netflix) telling me the same thing, I can’t be checking service by service and comparing with other ISPs on how to optimise the routes for all the services. They should be doing that.
I did some traceroutes and I found my ISP is doing the same thing. It’s only affecting my ISP because of how they are handling the routing tables I think?
Instead of finding a new service provider (i’m stuck in a 2 year contract) that’s being lagged and spending 2-3 weeks trying to get them to optimise the route, I want to make a complaint to my ISP and get them to permanently fix these routing issues if possible and if not, complain to the government body that regulates them; but I need to know what exactly I’m supposed to say to them and how they can fix it. I know it can be done because the other ISPs are doing something different and are not plagued by the same issues as those who are on my ISP.
I don’t know how ISP’s run, I vaguely know how networking works, I am not a professional IT person, everything I know is self taught.
Does anyone have any advice on this and on how to start, maybe someone that knows how networking works at an ISP could give me some advice on what kind of evidence should I gather or how I can convince my ISP to fix their routing issues permanently?
