Anyone Work in NOC?

[asleeperj]

A very small ISP provides my fiber internet. I'm having an issue with latency in one game. I did a tracert to see what is going on, and my packets are being sent from my home town (near San Antonio,) to Lubbock Texas (opposite direction) then to California, and finally back to Atlanta GA where the servers are. Every other game I play is fine. Is this something an NOC person can fix, and if so what information do I need to give them to help them fix it?

I already have all the IP ranges for the servers, and I have the IP address of the ISP in lubbock that is sending my traffic to California before it sends it anywhere else. Should I contact my ISP or the Lubbock one first? When I play other games my traffic is usually routed to Austin, then Dallas, then to the city the servers are in.

[Donut417]

5 hours ago, asleeperj said:

A very small ISP provides my fiber internet. I'm having an issue with latency in one game. I did a tracert to see what is going on, and my packets are being sent from my home town (near San Antonio,) to Lubbock Texas (opposite direction) then to California, and finally back to Atlanta GA where the servers are. Every other game I play is fine. Is this something an NOC person can fix, and if so what information do I need to give them to help them fix it?

I already have all the IP ranges for the servers, and I have the IP address of the ISP in lubbock that is sending my traffic to California before it sends it anywhere else. Should I contact my ISP or the Lubbock one first? When I play other games my traffic is usually routed to Austin, then Dallas, then to the city the servers are in.

No ISP is going to change the route for YOU. PERIOD. You will have to deal with what you given like the rest of us peasants. Once the traffic leaves you're home, you have no control on the route it may take. Once the traffic leaves your ISP's network, they no longer have control over it as well. Who knows how many providers your data is going thru. 

[Dutch_Master]

As said, they won't change the system for you. But if you present it as an opportunity to improve the performance of their network, who knows?

 

Btw, you're lucky your data packets stay within the Continental US, they may just as well be redirected across the Pacific. Twice! Imagine the latency of that!

[Cam The Music Man]

I've been working for a local WISP (wireless internet provider).  A few things I've learned about how networks interconnect at various exchanges is that there is some matter of "game" that needs to be played at major datacenter exchanges where all the various providers meet and interconnect.

There are several factors that could lead to this kind of hopping issue, and it comes down to two that I can think of off the top of my head:
1.  At the physical/topological level: (layer 1-2) the "path" being provided to you and the particular game servers you are connected to have the "lowest cost" among a number of other variables resulting in routers choosing to route that path.  There are also functions which could cause "stickiness" where once that path for packets coming from your particular subnet in the ISP's network might also get memorized by other border gateway routers through the use of label-switching (MPLS, VPLS), at least in my limited working knowledge of these features and functions.
2.  The ISP may have chosen to only create "peering" connections with specific other neighboring services at the exchange, and there is no "more cost effective" path for you to connect to the particular services between your provider's network and the larger exchanges.

There's no way to know for sure without being on the inside with that ISP, as a network administrator or architect.