Comment by toast0
3 hours ago
What is your path towards 'resolving' these issues?
I've done some mapping while comparing turn servers my org hosted on cloud vms vs a commercial offering, and it's pretty easy to find very different routing from point A to point B, but sometimes it's pretty clearly that not every transit network has access to every submarine cable, so traffic from say Brazil to South Africa might go from Brazil directly to Africa, or it might go to Florida, then Europe, then Africa. It'd be nice to take a more direct route, but maybe the Brazil -> Africa hop doesn't transit all the way, so BGP prefers the scenic route as it has a shorter AS path.
I didn't have any leverage to motivate routing changes though, so other than saying hmm, that's interesting, there wasn't much to do about it.
From our data side, we focus on network diversity and conduct continuous measurements. Due to the nature of our measurements and our knowledge of the precise locations of all 1330 servers, we understand how network packets travel across the internet. We simplify this information into algorithms and know how to accommodate detours that packets may take. There are specific patterns that we can identify and map, like some African servers route their traffic through LINX or a French IXP. If you are not connecting to private networks or even major telecoms on EU-based IXPs.
To help the system, we are reaching out to IXPs, major telecoms and peering agencies to advise them on how to peer and make critical internet routing decisions. We want to tell them on how to engage in data-focused peering, how their IXP is perceived from a broader internet data perspective, and how their packets from the IXP travel across the internet. We hope this colloboration will bring much needed efficiency in internet routing.