[SOLVED] ISP Routing to ESEA

[nolanklutz]

I live in Indiana and yet I get 70-100+ ping to ESEA (3rd party CS:GO client) servers. I have 300/300 fiber from a smaller company (TDS Telecom) and the default routing is hit or miss for example to League of Legends I get about 30 default, (Chicago server) But to other Chicago servers it can be anywhere from 30-50. So I use WTFast (Basically a VPN) for these servers and it legit is a better route to these servers and reduces my ping by about 10-40 depending on the server location. However, for whatever reason I can't get WTFast to work with ESEA (as I think they intentionally do not allow traffic to route through VPN's) So as mentioned I'm stuck with 70-100+ to ESEA specific "Chicago" servers, even though when I got WTFast to trigger in the client for the server browser was showing 10-20 ping to Chicago. I ran a traceroute and according to hop 3 and 4 they are both owned by my ISP and recording 100+ms. So of course when I sent this to ESEA they blamed my ISP solely for the issues which is fair enough. I also contacted WTFast and they kind of brushed me off as from a business perspective they can't claim to work with 3rd party private servers.

So i'm left at a standstill, is there anything I can do aside form contacting my ISP? I will probably try contacting them soon, but the customer support line is TERRIBLE, the odds that I even will be able to get to talk to someone that would investigate routing issues is going to be a serious challenge.

 

[bill001g]

If you know about wtfast then you already know that you can not actually change your routing in your ISP.

wtfast is not anything magical. What they have done is purchased a private path though varies ISP/telco that is engineered to give minimum latency to certain locations. It actually runs on the same fiber many times as the internet but it is given priority over internet. The problem is they have only engineered paths to certain data centers/games. If you are not using a server that they have paid extra to get a optimum path to it may actually be worse than just going over your ISP.

This is one of those things I tell people to try it and see if it works but it does not work for everyone.

Your only hope would be to try other vpn services. You might get lucky and just a normal VPN service might work. It all depends on finding some VPN service your ISP has good connectivity to that also has good connectivity to the ISP that the game company is using. This is all going to be trial and error mostly.

So I got lucky and found your ISP AS number. This shows they do not have very good internet peering. They do not connect to directly to some of the largest tier 1 ISP like ATT or verizon. They mostly use telia which is tier1 but not real big, and Hurricane electric which kinda uses a lot of telia stuff too. So in effect you likely need to find a vpn service that uses telia.

https://bgp.he.net/AS4181#_peers

 

[nolanklutz]

If you know about wtfast then you already know that you can not actually change your routing in your ISP.

wtfast is not anything magical. What they have done is purchased a private path though varies ISP/telco that is engineered to give minimum latency to certain locations. It actually runs on the same fiber many times as the internet but it is given priority over internet. The problem is they have only engineered paths to certain data centers/games. If you are not using a server that they have paid extra to get a optimum path to it may actually be worse than just going over your ISP.

This is one of those things I tell people to try it and see if it works but it does not work for everyone.

Your only hope would be to try other vpn services. You might get lucky and just a normal VPN service might work. It all depends on finding some VPN service your ISP has good connectivity to that also has good connectivity to the ISP that the game company is using. This is all going to be trial and error mostly.

So I got lucky and found your ISP AS number. This shows they do not have very good internet peering. They do not connect to directly to some of the largest tier 1 ISP like ATT or verizon. They mostly use telia which is tier1 but not real big, and Hurricane electric which kinda uses a lot of telia stuff too. So in effect you likely need to find a vpn service that uses telia.

https://bgp.he.net/AS4181#_peers

Thanks for the rundown! I tried a few and finally settled on ExpressVPN as it is giving me 20ping to ESEA Chicago servers which is exactly what I was hoping for.