Re: Optimizing Singapore peering?

[Barry Greene via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>]

Hi Landy,

You are running into the “Singapore Peering Triad” problem. Way back in 1996, the big three ISPs (the only ISPs at the 
time), did a trilateral peering agreement. Year later when more ISPs came onto the market and SGIX was created, the big 
three said "why would we want to peer on SGIX - we have our own things going, it is working, and it is a compeditive 
edge.”

The way around this is to show up at the NOGs in the region (see https://apnog.org/ops/nogs.html). Singapore is not the 
only country with this fun. Indonesia, Thailand, and Philippines have these ‘dances’ needed to get effective peering. 
APRICOT is happing soon - which would have the top three ISPs in Singapore (see 
https://2026.apricot.net/programme/peering-personals#/). 

Barry

> On Jan 19, 2026, at 03:50, Landy Bible via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org> wrote:
>
> Hey NANOG,
>
> I realize this is "NA" NOG list, but I assume I'm not the only one
> here who is operating a global network.
>
> 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.
>
> My question to the list here is... for those of you who also operate
> in Singapore... what would you suggest we do to improve things here?
>
> 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.
>
> > From a business perspective our primary concern is latency for our big
> customers who are hosted on the clouds in the area, but I don't want
> to just ignore our other customers who aren't in the cloud.
>
> 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.
>
> Thanks All,
> Landy
> AS62902
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