Question ISP added a new hop that is far away from end point ?

[BonkersTV]

Hello, I'm in the UK connecting to the North American Riot Games server up until about 3 weeks ago my connection was a very stable 105-110ms then they seemingly added a new hop that takes my traffic from NYC which used to be the final hop but now it goes down to Miami and then back up to Chicago which is the end point at first I thought it might be a short term outage but its been just over 3 weeks now so I'm a little lost on what/if I can do anything,

My ISP is Virgin Media and I'm on PC with an ethernet connection.
This is an image of PingPlotter

 

[cruisetung]

Use a VPN to change your route.

Wireguard is faster than OpenVPN based.

You can only try yourself, no one can test it on your behalf.

 

[BonkersTV]

Use a VPN to change your route.

Wireguard is faster than OpenVPN based.

Sorry I should have added this on. Yes a VPN does bring the ping back to around 115-120 but is there nothing that can be done to get it back to normal? If I contact my ISP can they actually do anything about it?

 

[cruisetung]

Sorry I should have added this on. Yes a VPN does bring the ping back to around 115-120 but is there nothing that can be done to get it back to normal? If I contact my ISP can they actually do anything about it?

Probably not.

 

[bill001g]

Your problem is internet routing is not actually based on the best and most effective path. It all comes down to money. Who owns what fiber routers and what agreements they have with other ISP.
This site I find the easiest to use to get information on ownership of IP you see in traces.

https://bgp.he.net/AS6830

It seem the final hops....note you did not include the ones where you think it goes from miami to chicago are owned by liberty media. This company either owns part or all of virgin media in the UK. You can barely keep up with these company mergers and they don't tend to change the names you see in the traceroute so you have to really dig to see who owns IP. Sometimes it gets hard to find information when they make a effort to hide ownership.

So your ISP prefers to use its own network rather than pay another ISP for transport. What is causing the issue is the connection to riot. It all depends on what the agreement is between riot and your ISP for connectivity. They do not always connect in most optimum cities. From what I can tell company aorta was at one time partially owned by companies based in south america so a Miami connection tend to be were thing come in from say brazil.

Other than something interesting to look at it does not solve your issue it just explains why. You never know why a path might change. Could be a fiber got cut or some agreement for rental of fiber expired. Unless you want to buy the massive holding company that owns your ISP you can do nothing about this pathing.

As other mentioned the only way to do this is to use a different "virtual" isp using a VPN that might have different routing. There is not way to predict this because the vpn must still travel over your ISP to the VPN data centers and that path again all depends on who paid who for allowing the traffic.

 

[evermorex76]

Just further interesting information. Most ISPs want to get the traffic OFF of their own networks as quickly as possible (so they aren't having to carry the load and add capacity) but they want to do it by transferring it through non-paid peering points preferably, where two providers have agreements that they'll each accept traffic from each other at no cost, and each one hopes they'll get the better end of the deal by being able to offload more traffic than they'll accept. Or they'll want to do it via public peering points where many large providers all pay to be part of it and they all accept traffic as needed. Your ISP then has to consider whether it costs more to be part of that peering point, or whether the peering directly with another ISP is forcing them to accept more traffic than they send, or if it would be cheaper to just increase their own capacity (or deal with heavier congestion and the complaints that might generate from their customers).

Aside from changes to peering agreements, it could also have been that the other provider in NYC that was previously receiving your traffic was itself congested, and therefore your ISP actually decided to stop using them as a route for this traffic because the current route became preferable overall, for most customers, even though your particular connection may have gotten worse. (It's not just that one hop, its every hop after that as well.) In this case your ISP would have been protecting its customers' quality of service in general. (Routing protocols are supposed to handle this sort of thing automatically, by using quality of service and metrics to indicate the level of performance of a route, so the sending router can make a decision about which one is better. Your ISP COULD, technically, manually modify the route for your destination to override this, but they aren't going to do it just because you ask, and then for the rest of time have to see that manual modification in their router/switch configurations and perhaps lose all documentation of why it's there.)

 

[BonkersTV]

Wow thank you guys for the reply's I've learned more from this one post then 3 weeks of digging around on my own. Glad to know I'm at the mercy of our corporate overlords, I'll use a VPN in the meantime and might try a new ISP once my current contract is over, Thanks for the help.

 

[evermorex76]

Changing your ISP because of one game? Just how badly does that longer hop affect your latency? You're already crossing the Atlantic Ocean. (Given the speed of signals in fiber, it's really the processing equipment that adds latency, not distance when we're talking about within a country.)

Oh, dang, just saw the pingplotter. An extra 135ms. They must be routing that over a DSL connection.

It wouldn't necessarily hurt to send a support request asking them to look at whether there's a connection or routing issue in NYC. As a former ISP tech, it is possible for things to get missed if automated monitoring and rerouting is covering it up, or somebody just mistakenly cleared an alarm without resolving the issue. Just be prepared for an automated script response and no actual human reading it. (You could also ask on social media and have a nice back and forth with them there. Or try to find their NOC email address.)

 

[BonkersTV]

Changing your ISP because of one game? Just how badly does that longer hop affect your latency? You're already crossing the Atlantic Ocean. (Given the speed of signals in fiber, it's really the processing equipment that adds latency, not distance when we're talking about within a country.)

Oh, dang, just saw the pingplotter. An extra 135ms. They must be routing that over a DSL connection.

It wouldn't necessarily hurt to send a support request asking them to look at whether there's a connection or routing issue in NYC. As a former ISP tech, it is possible for things to get missed if automated monitoring and rerouting is covering it up, or somebody just mistakenly cleared an alarm without resolving the issue. Just be prepared for an automated script response and no actual human reading it. (You could also ask on social media and have a nice back and forth with them there. Or try to find their NOC email address.)

Yeah, I'll give it a try, thanks for the advice