Hi Landy, You are running into the “Singapore Peering Triad” problem. Way back in 1996, the big three ISPs (the only ISPs at the time), did a trilateral peering agreement. Year later when more ISPs came onto the market and SGIX was created, the big three said "why would we want to peer on SGIX - we have our own things going, it is working, and it is a compeditive edge.”
The way around this is to show up at the NOGs in the region (see https://apnog.org/ops/nogs.html). Singapore is not the only country with this fun. Indonesia, Thailand, and Philippines have these ‘dances’ needed to get effective peering. APRICOT is happing soon - which would have the top three ISPs in Singapore (see https://2026.apricot.net/programme/peering-personals#/). Barry > On Jan 19, 2026, at 03:50, Landy Bible via NANOG <[email protected]> > wrote: > > Hey NANOG, > > I realize this is "NA" NOG list, but I assume I'm not the only one > here who is operating a global network. > > Context: we have a dozen or so PoPs around the world to serve our load > balancer product. We're using continent-specific prefixes to run > anycast for this. We are on at least one IX at each location, and use > Cogent as our primary transit provider. We'd like to add a real Tier 1 > provider at each pop in the future, but In general, this all works ok > right now. > > However, Singapore is a problem. We're on SGIX, but we're seeing a > rather high percentage of traffic that originates in Singapore > entering our Tokyo PoP instead. Google Cloud in particular is REALLY > bad, with application latency testing approaching nearly 1 second, > when our typical global latency is under 100ms on an end to end test. > Other SG clouds are bad, but not THAT bad. > > My question to the list here is... for those of you who also operate > in Singapore... what would you suggest we do to improve things here? > > We're looking at adding Arelion or NTT transit in APAC, but we're also > trying to get PNIs (or even full IP transit) to the big Singapore > networks like SingTel, SingNet, and StarHub, but we haven't had any > luck yet. Perhaps we just don't know the right people. > >> From a business perspective our primary concern is latency for our big > customers who are hosted on the clouds in the area, but I don't want > to just ignore our other customers who aren't in the cloud. > > Based on my research thus far, my gut says getting transit from > Arelion is probably my best "bang for buck" move, but I'm wondering if > any of you have any insights or wisdom to share about Singapore or > APAC in general. > > Thanks All, > Landy > AS62902 > _______________________________________________ > NANOG mailing list > https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/7BRGQAGWBGFQOOJHV4ZVXVZZFPJHPKH2/ _______________________________________________ NANOG mailing list https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/ECUIF5BXJPUQHJGJ4WWRH6WR4GNSEUVH/
