Re: Optimizing Singapore peering?

[Jon Lewis via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>]

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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