Source: http://sgix.sg/en/memberslist/

Why many of the big names disappeared? What happened?

Big players abandonment of the SGIX project and the not so stellar residential take-up rate to wire up the homes make me imagine the Next Gen NBN is doomed to be a failure. Maybe S$1 billion government funding is not enough.

May I know what about Malaysian servers? I am looking for a direct or real fast access to web server which host web applications in ASP.NET and MSSQL. Any recommendation?

Agreed with your comments that SGIX is progressing too slow, but we are on our way.

Here is the update of our status.
http://sgix.sg/en/?page_id=10

Yes. The connectivity to Voxel Singapore has definitely improved.

SGIX is progressing too slow. Hopefully, IDA could put more resources into this project. I will be visiting SGIX booth at CommunicAsia 2010 to find out what’s the latest development.

I wanted to reiterate what Adam said and thank you for the excellent post.

Since then, we have attempted to work around much of the problems we’ve seen with Asian networks and to that end even turned up a peering session with SingTel in Hong Kong.

We are hopeful about SGIX — but unfortunately there hasn’t been too much movement on it yet.

I was curious if you notice any difference in connectivity now?

Hope all is well.

Best.,

Raj Dutt
founder/CEO
Voxel dot Net Inc.

Yes, I was told the earthquake caused the re-routing. But at that time, I couldn’t understand why the re-routing because I expected the traffic to be within Singapore since the server is located in Singapore. I was not aware of all the competitions among the carriers.

Thank you for your in-depth explanation.

Excellent post!

StarHub and SingTel, Singapore’s two main “eyeball” (access) providers, are actually well-clued to the peering game. I’d imagine your traceroute was run last month in the midst of the earthquake, when traffic was *temporarily* re-routed due to capacity constraints. In contrast, here’s a trace run today, from a cloud server in our Singapore datacenter, 180.92.184.2:

1 v100.csr1.sin1.sg.voxel.net (72.26.221.1) 0.538 ms 0.575 ms 0.606 ms
2 21.te1-2.tsr1.sin1.sg.voxel.net (72.26.220.17) 0.180 ms 0.213 ms 0.243 ms
3 ge9-24.br01.sin02.pccwbtn.net (63.218.229.13) 0.524 ms 0.576 ms 0.635 ms
4 203.116.89.133 (203.116.89.133) 1.470 ms 1.507 ms 1.561 ms
5 165.21.45.93 (165.21.45.93) 33.958 ms 33.969 ms 33.958 ms
6 202.166.126.113 (202.166.126.113) 34.699 ms 34.682 ms 34.643 ms
7 202.166.126.122 (202.166.126.122) 84.547 ms 84.593 ms 84.770 ms
8 xe-11-3-0.singha.singnet.com.sg (202.166.120.186) 33.617 ms 33.654 ms 33.644 ms
9 xe-1-0-0.stella.singnet.com.sg (202.166.120.14) 34.449 ms 34.333 ms 34.450 ms
10 202.166.124.106 (202.166.124.106) 83.823 ms 84.490 ms 84.409 ms
11 bb116-14-180-1.singnet.com.sg (116.14.180.1) 35.538 ms 35.241 ms 35.794 ms

(This should have been communicated to you at the time, I’m curious if it might not have been…)

All the same, your point is a valid one. NTT won’t peer with PCCW in Japan, and PCCW won’t peer with NTT in Hong Kong, so the two networks settled on San Jose as a common meeting ground. China Telecom will peer in Asia, technically speaking, though is continually a source of congestion and/or “interesting” routing. Many European carriers built into Singapore and neighboring countries to service existing customers with international presences, remaining unfamiliar with the local ecosystem, and disinterested in interconnecting or even budgeting for sufficient backbone redundancy back home. The list goes on…

The SGIX is comprised of a great team, genuinely interested in making the Internet a better place; we have high hopes for its adoption. At the same time, it’s important to realize that considerable infrastructure for interconnection exists today. One need only look to the Equinix exchanges in Singapore and Hong Kong, the HK-IX in Hong Kong, and countless private cross-connects in the Equinix and Mega-I facilities, for success stories.

The problem today are the carriers who view peering inside Asia as enabling would-be competitors, not working together towards the common goal of servicing customers. This is solved with a free marketplace, open access to affordable “local loops” (while I don’t view the Singaporean providers as the problem, the NBN is itself fascinating; I’d love to see widely-available, tariffed, Metro Ethernet point-to-points here in the US , and ultimately customers voting with their wallets.

In any event, I’m leaving you my e-mail address with my post. Please don’t hesitate to contact me should you wish to re-run your tests and/or discuss things further. Alternately, I’d be happy to introduce you to our up-and-coming Singapore sales team, who I’m sure would love to buy you some dinner and talk shop.

Regards,
-Adam Rothschild (Vice President, Network, Voxel dot Net)