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

[Sam McLeod]

All I can say is wow - I've had tens, upon tens of responses to my post!

Thank you for the information that those of you who have contacted me
have provided, it's certainly painted a consistently clear picture for
me that resonates with my personal experiences of dealing with said
companies.

As most replies were sent to me directly I shall obviously respect
peoples privacy by not responding with their comments in the mailing
list, however the general summary from what I'm hearing from people who
have emailed me is:

* "TPG / AAPT / PIPE are not trustworthy and are likely BSing you /
pulling the wool over your eyes."
* "TPG / AAPT / PIPE / Tronic's routes do indeed look very wrong" and
the situation I've described is "not good routing behaviour."
* Other customers in Adelaide and Brisbane amongst others experience the
same routing issues with TPG / AAPT / PIPE or Tronic.
* They appear "not to have paid for a Melbourne POP/POI and are cheaping
out on their network design."
* Several responses were that people are in the works or about to
"cancel their connections with them."
* People have experiences "City -> Sydney -> Original City routing from
PIPE... within their own rack in the same DC."
* Multiple responses stating that after investigation "TPG/PIPE or
Tronic's routing is 'broken' or 'insane'."

--
Sam McLeod
@s_mcleod | smcleod.net

Words are my own opinions and do not necessarily represent those of my
employer of partners.

---

On Wed, 10 May 2017, at 01:15 PM, Sam McLeod wrote:
> 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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