I have a particular and unique routing problem here in Dublin. The problem is laid out below. My question is: How on earth can I solve it? What's the best way of forcefully sinking a toe in the appropriate behind?

Within 10km (6-7 miles) of me as the crow flies are data centres for: Amazon web services; Google; Microsoft; Apple; Meta, and many more. We have huge internet infrastructure nationally, with under-sea fibre-optic trunk cables to East (UK), to West (US), & to South (Europe). I should have the best of all worlds.

But when I try to access these servers 10km away, bandwidth can be terrible. Zoom, for instance, keeps telling me my internet is unstable. I know for a fact the Zoom servers for Ireland are in Dublin's City West, <10km away. Here's the traceroute for that: The 4th one (in bold) is a trunk router 160 miles South of me. My traceroute is apparently headed for the undersea route to the European mainland, probably Zoom's servers in the Netherlands. But it obviously hits a bottle-neck at that point. Thence, it will have to come back to Ireland, probably through the same bottleneck again .

Another site I had issues with used to go to the US via our undersea link), through a bottleneck, and back to City West where their servers were located, not 10 km from me. I couldn't watch video above 520p from that 'streaming' site, which indicates < 1Mbps bandwidth. But that lot moved their servers to the UK now. I'm not tempted to re-subscribe in any case.

Sadly, it's not a simple case. Ireland was given a paltry IPV4 allocation, but has been busy buying up blocks of unused IPV4 addresses. My own fixed IP (92.51.x.x) was bought from Russia, and is split between some Scandinavian country and ourselves. We bought another block from Romania recently. Also, because of the very tight restrictions in getting a .ie IP allocation, many name their websites with other tlds. So no general routing rules can be written.

Once traffic leaves your equipment, there's not much you can do about it but complain to upstream. Does ip6 give similar results?

'traceroute -I' or 'sudo traceroute -T' usually yields better results and may help you understand what's going on.

I had a somewhat similar problem, that was definitely DNS related and only ISP could help on this. But your case can be different.

Oh, does your internet service use a "fritz box"? I have heard of them, they have a reputation ... What kind of internet do you have? what are your maximum download and upload speeds supposed to be? Unless you have a fiber connection, most other types of delivery are not symmetrical bandwidths.

A low upload bandwidth could explain your trouble with zoom. That is not just an Irish problem, it happens everywhere.

Yes, I have a fritz box router and it's fine. Resolv.conf matters less here because dhcpcd redirects dns to the fritz box, which redirects it to the servers I set on the fritz box(opendns.org, I think).

I'm having issues with protonvpn ATM, but once I sort them, I can use the protonvpn-cli to have my vpn emerge from multi-various places, and in effect be routed from there, so that is one option I will try. Perfection in this case would be taking a direct route staying in Dublin. That exists. But my isp is 40 miles away. Staying in Ireland would be good for the signal. So would not going through bottlenecks.

A peculiarly "Irish" solution springs to mind after reading all of your comments. Pack a liveslak live usb, visit folks on different isps, and trace the route their signals take, on the off chance they have a better routing setup.

Irish networks have a semi-state company managing the network infrastructure, but not supplying anyone. A number of companies then buy from them and sell the service on to users. So they can't do much about the internet back bone, but they can about their own routing table. I shouldn't be going near the internet back bone.

I did select 2 different and very local dns servers, and the route was equally bad. I see the problem as routing tables. There's a joke about an Irishman's response when asked for directions by the roadside: With protonvpn-cli, I can try that!

My trace to zoom.us from "up the road" in Blanchardstown jumps from Virgin Media to Liberty media in Netherlands and then doesn't report any of the other hops.

I'm over in Templeogue. Who is your ISP? Either way, it's pretty much the same as mine. My meetings used to be in the Netherlands during Covid, but now they're local. It seems that the Internet backbone routing hasn't caught up yet .

Virgin Media, 1Gb FTP

Routing is much more dependent on interconnect agreements these days, the idea of traffic being routed to a central "backbone" and onwards are diminishing.

EDIT: Want to talk about Irish routing? I ordered something physical from a store in Ballymun, it was quicker and cheaper to make use of their free shipping to the UK and pay the €4 (or whatever it was) to have Parcel Motel bring it down from Belfast than to have them charge €12 shipping to deliver direct. The reason? "We do so much to the UK that Royal Mail send a van to pick it up for us, for Ireland we have to get someone to go from the store to An Post and post it." How's that for routing in Ireland?

Ah, happy days with Parcel Motel. But they closed up, didn't they? The customs rules went against them.

Yup, totally destroyed their business model.

Can you find the local IP address and if possible the ipV6 one?

Dig zoom.us for clues.

/Much Later.

Thanks for the reply. I can't get IPV6 through the router - it's old. I'km working on that. there's not much point digging zoom.us. It's distributed between local servers in the US, Netherlands, Ireland and goodness knows where else

This is solved. It's actually not a problem. Explanation below.

Meanwhile, my vpn software is back functioning, so I tried from the Dutch servers and ran pretty quickly into cloudfare servers, with timeouts after that. Cloudfare gives this one American address on most of it's IPs.

So I tried connected through the US vpn server, and that proved entertaining. Ihis 'm247.ro' server with a liberal and confusing sprinkling of unconnected business names which is described as a network backbone router, but also appears to be cloudfare again. That appears to be Europe? Next it's 206.82.104.0, back in New York. Then it rattles around in cloudfare and starts timing out. But all fast hops before that.

Finally, I tried Ireland on vpn, and the route has totally changed. I was on for 2 hours today, and no instability was reported. Zoom were on Amazon's servers back in the days of Covid, but I don't see Amazon anywhere in the route. I used get a line of Amazon servers with 50-60 mS per hop. It's now internet backbone, & cloudfare.

Lastly I tried with no vpn, and got this:
That last one is inex-cork.as13335.net. With a name like inex-cork.as13335.net, I took to be a trunk router in Cork City, which is the infrastructure mainline out of Ireland into Europe. But no, it belongs to a cloud data centre in Dublin's City West! So the above route translates to

1. My router
2. My isp
3. My isp again
4. Some cloud company in Dublin's City West.

And not even I would try to improve that. Timing is short & snappy. I can only presume that when it goes unstable, something else is wrong. So I'll have to chase it when it's unstable.