Why are US servers being routed through the netherlands?

Bazgrim · June 2018

I opened up a ticket awhile back about major latency spikes and customer support told me that it was my ISP after giving me directions to fix my FPS.... (A+ Customer Support)
Double checking everything with my ISP and everything is fine.

I then booted up ESO and grabbed 2 IP's it connected through.
198.20.200.32
198.20.200.23

These both have the same tracert for the most part, but what concerns me is the fact that US servers are being routed through Amsterdam for some reason?

|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|                                      WinMTR statistics                                   |
|                       Host              -   %  | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
|                             192.168.1.1 -    0 |  175 |  175 |    0 |    0 |    1 |    0 |
|                              10.36.72.1 -    0 |  175 |  175 |    4 |   11 |   37 |    8 |
|                          100.127.73.182 -    0 |  175 |  175 |    7 |   12 |   32 |    9 |
|                          100.120.100.10 -    0 |  175 |  175 |    8 |   13 |   64 |   12 |
|                              68.1.4.252 -    0 |  175 |  175 |   19 |   25 |   86 |   21 |
|         ae20.mpr1.lax12.us.zip.zayo.com -    0 |  175 |  175 |   19 |   24 |   47 |   22 |
|                           128.177.68.30 -    0 |  175 |  175 |   20 |   25 |   50 |   22 |
|  po110.bs-a.sech-lax.netarch.akamai.com -    0 |  175 |  175 |   19 |   24 |   49 |   23 |
|ae120.access-a.sech-lax.netarch.akamai.com -    0 |  175 |  175 |   19 |   24 |   45 |   27 |
|                          93.191.173.113 -    1 |  171 |  170 |  119 |  201 |  326 |  217 |
|                   No response from host -  100 |   34 |    0 |    0 |    0 |    0 |    0 |
|                   No response from host -  100 |   34 |    0 |    0 |    0 |    0 |    0 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|
   WinMTR v0.92 GPL V2 by Appnor MSP - Fully Managed Hosting & Cloud Provider

93.191.173.113 is a netherlands IP http://ipaddress.is/93.191.173.113

Also a huge jump in latency and some packet loss.
Maybe someone can enlighten me why US ESO servers are jumping across the ocean?

imredneckson · June 2018

??? If that correct, then damn!

Bazgrim · June 2018

After attempting to contact support several times and no response to this thread.

I've uninstalled and let my ESO plus run out because I can't play with MS spiking through the roof every 5 seconds in an action combat game.... Which appears to be due to the issue stated above.

Beardimus · June 2018

imredneckson wrote: »

??? If that correct, then damn!

Dam?

sherahd · June 2018

This is the problem I am having!!! I have random latency spikes all the time. When I run a trace route mine looks almost exactly the same. I have had it for over two weeks! Can I ask when your latency started happening? I think mine started the 11th of June. Whenever I did a trace route to the suggested IP they give for US people to try and test connectivity I get a VERY similar result. If I just ping it... It instantly times out. I am referring to the 198.20.198.110. I have not had much luck with the customer service. It took a while for them to even respond, then the responses I got were to do port forwarding on my router, which I did and they didn't help. Well, I did the ones for the game itself. The steam ones they give make no sense. They reuse the same ports line after line... So, the router is like. "Really?! You just used that port!" I told them that and I keep getting canned responses about me doing the port forwarding. I knew it! I knew the problem was somewhere between me and the servers, or that something screwy was happening on the way to the servers. How do we get this fixed?!

Azurya · June 2018

playing from EU on the NA-server that is fine for me.
I face much less disconnects, freezes and other stuff while playing as EU-based on NA-Server.
I also play on the EU-server and there I have almost every 40 minutes a disconnect, most content in the game is not playable at all. Even in Maelstromarena you face disconnects, though you are supposed to be alone with the NPCs in there.

So yeah something is definetly not working as intended, imho

SpearDusk · June 2018

ESO are "lagging" behind in their servers infrastructure. From my experience, even SWTOR are better than them. I just hope it becomes more stable, because I've been disconnecting way more over the past few weeks.

WyndStryke · July 2018

Geolocation is highly unreliable. They often just tell you the location of the owner of the IP, not where the IP is actually assigned to. So you often get really misleading results (for example, I am located in the EU but websites often think I am in Florida because the corporate network which owns the IP address originated from there).

The routing of traffic to ZOS is mainly controlled by Akamai - they'll be sending the traffic to what they think is their nearest scrubbing centre (there are 7 worldwide, 2 in the USA, 1 in London, one in Frankfurt (Germany), one in Sydney, and a few others). The IP address 93.191.173.113 is owned by Akamai Proxlexic which does the DDoS scrubbing protection.

(Obviously ... if you are running a VPN or proxy it will be affecting the routing too).

-- Edit:

Apparently Akamai are adding a bunch of new scrubbing centres soon. There will be 16 in total rather than just 7. The main increase is in USA with a few more coming in the EU too.

Bazgrim · July 2018

WyndStryke wrote: »

Geolocation is highly unreliable. They often just tell you the location of the owner of the IP, not where the IP is actually assigned to. So you often get really misleading results (for example, I am located in the EU but websites often think I am in Florida because the corporate network which owns the IP address originated from there).

The routing of traffic to ZOS is mainly controlled by Akamai - they'll be sending the traffic to what they think is their nearest scrubbing centre (there are 7 worldwide, 2 in the USA, 1 in London, one in Frankfurt (Germany), one in Sydney, and a few others). The IP address 93.191.173.113 is owned by Akamai Proxlexic which does the DDoS scrubbing protection.

(Obviously ... if you are running a VPN or proxy it will be affecting the routing too).

-- Edit:

Apparently Akamai are adding a bunch of new scrubbing centres soon. There will be 16 in total rather than just 7. The main increase is in USA with a few more coming in the EU too.

Have to see if MS improves after.

Right now it appears that the MS shown in the tracert is representative of my MS in-game.
200-300MS in an action combat game is not fun.

I'm not running a VPN, but if the node is in-fact located in the US and still providing high MS, its possible their DDoS protection is going haywire for some reason. There's no reason that the DDoS protection should add an additional 150-200MS.

Gilvoth · July 2018

well, if this is true, then wow, that's pretty messed up, and no wonder we have all the problems we do with lagg and such.

Gilvoth · July 2018

who would be at fault for this?

Sylvermynx · July 2018

As for geolocation.... my "broadband" is wildblue sat. At any given time of any given day, geolocation shows me logged in from various places: AZ (some tiny place I've never been and never heard of); CO; several places in CA; and a couple in Canada.

Personally? I love it. Google continually asks me to "verify" where I live so their geolocation server can "improve". Get stuffed....