Optimizing Singapore peering?
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
Hey Landy, That 1s GCP latency suggests more than poor peering. We’ve seen Singapore-to-Tokyo "trombones" caused by OHTTP relay chains and inspection clusters in Azure japaneast. GCP often triggers these high-latency paths when encountering mid-path relays or non-standard certificate pinning. Check for encapsulation or proxying… your traffic could be forced through a processing hub in Japan before hitting the internet. - Joseph II -------- Original Message -------- On Sunday, 01/18/26 at 09:50 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 _______________________________________________ NANOG mailing list https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/nanog@lists.nanog.org/message/7BRGQAGW...
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 _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________
Always do your homework on who your transit providers connect with and where. Cheap transit is great, until it carries your bits everywhere except where you need them to go, The best thing to do in SG/APAC generally is to do a good analysis of where you need to get to first, then compare against the available providers to see where they connect to those destinations. It's not uncommon to need more than 1 provider to cover all the gaps. Interconnection in APAC is very fragmented , for a lot of reasons. On Sun, Jan 18, 2026 at 9:50 AM 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 _______________________________________________ NANOG mailing list
https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/nanog@lists.nanog.org/message/7BRGQAGW...
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 _______________________________________________ NANOG mailing list https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/nanog@lists.nanog.org/message/7BRGQAGW...
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 On Sunday, 18 January 2026 at 15:51, Landy Bible via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
Hey NANOG,
Hi!
... 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.
I can't comment on getting PNIs with those networks specifically, I'm not peered with them, but in general, I find that getting PNIs is almost always about speaking to the write person, it's annoying, but that has consistently been my experience unfortunately. If getting the PNIs doesn't work out, my advice would be to use the right tool for the job. You don't want a Tier 1 here, you want to a Tier 2. Tier 1s offer wide (global) but shallow connectivity, meaning they will get your traffic from any country to any country, but not much more granular than that in many cases. Tier 2s offer narrow (regional) but deep connectivity, meaning they will get your traffic to the exact PoP it needs to get to, but only as long as it's in their region. So in the case of Singapore, get transit from SG.GS. They are consistently one of the best connected networks in the world (better than many Tier 1s) and the best connected network in Asia. I know the folks there, can intro you off-list if you want (there's nothing weird going on here, I don't work for them, own shares, get commission, or anything like that). If you want to lower your latency in each region my advise would be to get connectivity from a well peered network within that region.
... 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 produced stats comparing all the Tier 1s and top 20 best connected non-Tier 1s at the end of last year, you can find it here: https://tier1-analysis.53bits.co.uk/part3/2025/README.html. For APAC, start with SG.GS and try SingTel, if you have to go to one of the more traditional ones, you don't want Arelion for Asia, you want NTT/Telstra/TaTa/PCCW. Cheers, James. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: ProtonMail wsG5BAEBCgBtBYJpbne+CRCoEx+igX+A+0UUAAAAAAAcACBzYWx0QG5vdGF0 aW9ucy5vcGVucGdwanMub3Jn8D5tME2lKTHqqxC6+M5xEec4hotYFyGEbEcX 3LsPXqwWIQQ+k2NZBObfK8Tl7sKoEx+igX+A+wAAbZsP/2eJiKqlNz9IWcrF I5ImyUTXSIvq+Dk6lWim09hXwIOBKCw0OJNaZjhHT0hXooWf2DBX6KkLbIix 4MjT2otku8HTiJ6NcGyb9tkivINx+pmeBzZSovAwRuSAV9MSqmsymAT4kKns b8ufYOOg6D10al45n5qUCoVjy9gAcXfk6vZnV5iJ93sPV/L757TUueZKi+bd NisubtcuF5+PjXj4G6XU0EILWbm5MjczhahOHqr6yMgYzV37iAWkE95XNn3i 6s9COKKOkC8YTgOMl7MnAEjuHETqYhhN4/OTlirZCu8yRRwyuHK0lFYRD89j MCLK+zRz2jlRtIJAYbUJQh1mb/Hd0XN8PBgDJFuJTAavrP7ehe2xs6iBwyDi d+xHNZPQ1vRLbyzsatqxCKudY2UMY78DFW2IW9WXVdYWT4E+0aMPHmxUD/xt pOS9yQWGsNvlVNl0NW/WxyfPywLJZ90j1oXpAXDtJHfYSx/VdudKL791OGci mBCcdOxA9oOYK1ZmIKigWddLpFE5WIbBY9gea+4TNo5jBHaBZHW6t8KOu8oR pVtU6j6GL5UImfvoX6OQixtTH6kjsa0KkNS07vCY3rURW/dh89+FKB5CisoB bp9/aZYcZuTBclSr4odtm/Mpk+C9cUqHnT3UsM9DxsC2PkP/ALakd21d3Li9 Fp8eyt7q =k8D8 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
participants (6)
-
Barry Greene -
Intergalactic Auditor -
James Bensley -
Jon Lewis -
Landy Bible -
Tom Beecher