[AusNOG] All Melbourne -> Melbourne Traffic Routing via Sydney with TPG/PIPE/Tronic

[Sam McLeod]

Hi AusNOG,  I was wondering if anyone else uses TPG/PIPE/Tronic in
Melbourne or another major city and has any input on this.  Essentially
all our traffic is backhauled all the way up from Melbourne to Sydney
and back, even if it’s destined for Melbourne.  I've been told by
TPG/PIPE/Tronic (Tronic is a reseller of TPG/PIPE) that this is on
purpose / by design:  ---  “This is by design …  When you get a
connection with PIPE this is connected to their Sydney Data Center as
this is their main core DC. Being the main core it has more bandwidth
and all the main local and international connections are directly
connected there. Where the Melbourne data center you peer to Sydney
first before going out most of these links.  So we are told the extra
latency from user to DC is worth it because from DC out you’ll get lower
latency and better bandwidth available.”  ---  Which makes no sense to
us as engineers as that’s not really how networks or the internet works,
we've even have services directly from PIPE in the past which wasn't
backhauled via Sydney.  This (along with peering) makes routing both
nationally and internationally, for example a route that goes out our
Vocus link to other ISPs here in Melbourne is 4-6 hops, whereas
TPG/PIPE/Tronic is anywhere from 18 to 26 hops.  In addition to the odd
network design, we experience weekly outages to TPG/PIPE/Tronic’s fibre
services with devices / hops within their network failing and packets
disappearing, when the reseller has logged tickets with TPG/PIPE the
results have been one of two things 1) (The most common) – there were no
problems or 2) There was a problem that affected traffic (no further
information).  So as you can imagine, this is a bit frustrating,
especially when we’ve been informed by our reseller that TPG/PIPE take
10 day to respond to a sev 1 production outage ticket that’s been logged
with them.  Now we’ve been told by our reseller that we’re absolutely
not allowed to log tickets directly with TPG/PIPE and must go through
them and as we’re still within contract we’ve got our hands tied to a
certain degree.  I’m not interested in having a whinge at
TPG/PIPE/Tronic here, I’m genuinely interested in finding out if others
have these problems as well and taking on any advice as to mitigating
all the issues this causes.  -- Sam McLeod  Words are my own opinions
and do not necessarily represent those of my employer of partners.
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