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

[Jay Dixon]

FWIW we're on a TPG/AAPT connection here and our routing is fine
we were on a PIPE/TPG connection at the previous office and i never noticed
any issues with it.

On Wed, May 10, 2017 at 2:11 PM, Sam McLeod <ausnog at smcleod.net> wrote:

> 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.
> >
> > _________________________________________________
> > AusNOG mailing list
> > AusNOG at lists.ausnog.net
> > http://lists.ausnog.net/mailman/listinfo/ausnog
> _______________________________________________
> AusNOG mailing list
> AusNOG at lists.ausnog.net
> http://lists.ausnog.net/mailman/listinfo/ausnog
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ausnog.net/pipermail/ausnog/attachments/20170510/be6dfd6b/attachment.html>