Because of interconnection agreements between ISPs, traffic to even a nearby server can take a long way around.
Why Your ISP and the server’s ISP aren’t directly connected → Effect Traffic passes through another country or city, adding distance and hops → On screen Only players on certain ISPs have unusually high ping
Primary owner Infra team (Network infrastructure) · Also External (External)
Infra team action items
Connect to multiple ISPs (multihoming), monitor ping per ISP to find the ones taking detours, negotiate route changes with ISPs.
External action items
Ask the ISP to adjust its routing.
Ballpark numbers
Even within one country, ping can differ two- or threefold depending on the route.
On the graph
Always high · RTT (by ISP/ASN)
Where to look
Compare RTT by ISP (ASN), and use traceroute or mtr from RIPE Atlas probes on the slow ISP, or from players, to see which countries and cities the route passes through. Measure IPv4 and IPv6 separately (mtr -4, -6)
Confirmed if
Within the same region, one ISP is always higher and its route passes through another country or a distant city. Or only one address family (IPv4 or IPv6) is high
Ruled out if
All ISPs similarly high: “Propagation delay (physical distance).” High only in the evening: “Peak-hour congestion at peering links”
Check with
Infra tools (no game code needed)
Learn more
IPv4 and IPv6 routes are chosen separately, so for the same server one of them can take a long detour and be slow (a 2016 APNIC measurement found separate groups of users within a single ISP for whom IPv6 was 15, 25, or 75 ms slower than IPv4). Apps that use Happy Eyeballs (RFC 8305) go with whichever of IPv6 and IPv4 connects first. They try IPv6 first, and if it connects within the recommended 250 ms, they never try IPv4. So they tend to end up on IPv6 even when that path is a little slower. If ping is high only on a particular ISP, measure IPv4 and IPv6 separately.
The Internet at the Speed of Light (HotNets 2014)ACM Actual router paths are about 1.5 times the straight fiber distance (median), and packets between two nearby points sometimes travel around the far side of the globe (hairpinning)
Probe Selection (RIPE Atlas REST API)RIPE NCC Select RIPE Atlas probes by country, region, ASN, or address prefix and run ping and traceroute from them
IPv6 Performance – RevisitedAPNIC Comparison of IPv6 and IPv4 round-trip times for the same dual-stack users: some access networks handle IPv6 packets completely differently, producing groups within one ISP where IPv6 is 15, 25, or 75 ms slower