On Sun, 18 Jan 2026, Landy Bible via NANOG wrote:
Context: we have a dozen or so PoPs around the world to serve our load
balancer product. We're using continent-specific prefixes to run
anycast for this. We are on at least one IX at each location, and use
Cogent as our primary transit provider. We'd like to add a real Tier 1
provider at each pop in the future, but In general, this all works ok
right now.
However, Singapore is a problem. We're on SGIX, but we're seeing a
rather high percentage of traffic that originates in Singapore
entering our Tokyo PoP instead. Google Cloud in particular is REALLY
bad, with application latency testing approaching nearly 1 second,
when our typical global latency is under 100ms on an end to end test.
Other SG clouds are bad, but not THAT bad.
It's been a couple of years since I left a global CDN that used Cogent as
one of its transit providers in most POPs (but not in Asia, because they
weren't an established Tier-1 there). Towards the end of that job, Cogent
tried to get established as a transit provider in Asia. At that time, the
problem with Cogent was anti-competitive practices from their "peers" in
Asia. Put simply, none of the Tier-1 providers established in Asia would
peer with Cogent in-market. The impact this had on our CDN service
(utilizing global anycast) was, any org dumb/cheap enough to rely on
Cogent transit in Asia would send their traffic to our CDN to Cogent, who
would send it to one of our west coast US POPs. The only way Cogent could
get bits to say NTT in Tokyo was via NTT peering in the US...so packets
would take the scenic route around the world to get around the block.
Assuming that hasn't changed, if you want traffic from non-Cogent eyeballs
in Asian markets to stay in-market rather than be routed around the world
and into some random POP, you need transit from local Tier-1's. In Asia,
we generally had NTT and TATA (and Singtel in SG) as our transits. We
were forced to add Cogent to the Asian POPs to solve the above-mentioned
problem.
We're looking at adding Arelion or NTT transit in APAC, but we're also
trying to get PNIs (or even full IP transit) to the big Singapore
networks like SingTel, SingNet, and StarHub, but we haven't had any
luck yet. Perhaps we just don't know the right people.
Buy ports from NTT and Singtel, and that will solve the problem.
Based on my research thus far, my gut says getting transit from
Arelion is probably my best "bang for buck" move, but I'm wondering if
any of you have any insights or wisdom to share about Singapore or
APAC in general.
I don't know what their peering is like in Asia, so if you want to go with
Arelion, I'd ask them "do you peer with NTT, Singtel, [and who else] in
Singapore?" before placing the order.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Jon Lewis, MCP :) | I route
Blue Stream Fiber, Sr. Neteng | therefore you are
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