The Ping That Won’t Go Away

The Ping That Won’t Go Away

Nathan Teo lives in a four-room HDB flat in Punggol, roughly four hundred metres from the nearest fibre termination point. He pays for a 2Gbps plan from one of the incumbent ISPs. He can stream 4K video on three devices at once. His video calls don’t stutter. And yet, every evening between eight and eleven, his game of Valorant becomes a slide show.

It’s not his connection speed. It’s the route.

“I was convinced something was wrong with my computer,” Teo says. He built a new one in early 2024 — AMD Ryzen 7, 32GB of RAM, a mid-range graphics card — and the lag still hit at the same time every night. He swapped out the router. He replaced the network cable. He called the ISP’s tech support three times. On the third call, a technician told him what he should have known from the start: local ISPs don’t control the path your packets take once they leave Singapore. They can guarantee you a fat pipe to the exchange. Everything after that is someone else’s problem.

The issue, as Teo eventually learned from a forum post on HardwareZone, wasn’t his plan or his hardware. It was the way Singapore’s consumer ISPs route traffic to the overseas game servers — specifically, to the server clusters in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and northern Virginia where competitive shooters and MOBAs host their ranked matches. The ISP’s default route often takes the cheapest path, not the shortest one. That path adds hops, increases jitter, and at peak hours, becomes a bottleneck that no amount of local bandwidth can fix.

Why the Big Three Don’t Care About Your Kill-Death Ratio

Singapore has three major residential ISPs — Singtel, StarHub, and M1 — plus a handful of smaller players and resellers. Their marketing focuses on headline download speeds, bundle discounts, and free router upgrades. None of them advertise routing transparency or per-game latency metrics. That’s not an oversight; it’s a deliberate choice.

“The consumer market in Singapore is built around streaming, browsing, and video calls,” says Jason Lim, a former network engineer for one of the larger ISPs. “Gaming traffic is a tiny fraction of total residential bandwidth, but it’s the most sensitive to bad routing. The cost of peering directly with game server providers — acquiring the IP space, maintaining BGP sessions, managing the contractual relationships — is not justified by the revenue from that subset of customers.”

Lim describes a calculation that most gamers don’t see. An ISP pays for transit — the upstream bandwidth it buys from a larger carrier to reach the rest of the internet — by the megabit per second. If it peers directly with a game server provider like AWS GameLift, Google Cloud, or a dedicated game hosting company, it saves transit costs on that traffic, but it incurs operational costs for the peering arrangement. The tipping point, Lim says, is somewhere around several hundred megabits per second of sustained game traffic. Below that threshold, it’s cheaper to let game traffic follow the general transit route, even if that route is suboptimal. Above it, direct peering starts to make sense.

Most residential ISPs in Singapore haven’t crossed that threshold on a per-game basis. They send your packets through a Tier 1 transit provider, often in a data centre somewhere in the western United States, even if the game server is in Tokyo. The packets arrive — eventually — but with added latency that compounds during peak hours, when the transit provider’s links are congested.

Teo’s HardwareZone thread eventually yielded a workaround. Someone recommended a cheap virtual private server in Tokyo, paired with a WireGuard tunnel. The idea was to route the game traffic through the VPS, bypassing the ISP’s congested transit link. Teo tried it. His ping dropped from 180 milliseconds to 70. “It felt like cheating,” he says. “Not the game — the network.”

The Middle-Mile Problem

The disconnect between local infrastructure and game server performance is not unique to Singapore. It’s a structural feature of how the internet works. But Singapore’s geography and market dynamics sharpen the problem in a specific way.

The country sits at the end of a relatively small number of submarine cable systems — the ones that connect Southeast Asia to the rest of the world. Most of these cables land at Changi or Tuas, then connect to the Equinix data centres in the island’s west. From there, your ISP’s traffic goes through a few key transit providers: Telstra Global, NTT Communications, and PCCW Global are among the most common. These transit providers have their own routing policies, which may or may not align with your goal of reaching a specific game server with minimal latency.

Lim describes a scenario he’s encountered multiple times in his career. “A customer in a condo near Suntec City buys a 1Gbps fibre plan because a game they want to play is launching in two weeks. They test their speed at a local speed test server — nine hundred megabits, easy. Then launch day comes, and the game is hosted on AWS in Osaka. Their latency is 150 milliseconds plus. They call us furious, and I have to explain that the last mile is fine. It’s the middle mile that’s the problem.”

The middle mile is where the routing decisions happen. It’s also where the cost-cutting lives. ISPs negotiate transit prices in bulk, and they choose the cheapest route that meets basic performance thresholds. A route that works acceptably for YouTube and Netflix — where latency matters less than sustained throughput — can be terrible for a real-time shooter. But the ISP’s service-level agreement measures uptime and average throughput, not per-game latency. The customer’s complaint doesn’t match the metric on which the ISP is evaluated.

There’s a specific moment when Teo’s frustration peaked. He had taken a day off work — a rare weekday off — specifically to play the launch of a new season in Apex Legends. He’d planned for it, told his friends he’d be online by noon. By one in the afternoon, the lag was so severe that his character would teleport forward several metres at a time, then snap back. He tried a different DNS. He tried disabling IPv6. He tried connecting the Ethernet cable directly from the ONT — the optical network terminal — to his PC, bypassing the router entirely. Nothing changed. He gave up and went to the library. “I spent the afternoon reading a book because my fucking internet couldn’t handle a video game. That’s the moment I started looking into alternatives.”

The VPS Gambit

The workaround that Teo found — renting a cheap VPS and tunnelling game traffic through it — is not new. It’s been a fixture of online gaming forums since at least the late 2010s, when services like WTFast and Mudfish commercialised the idea of a “gaming VPN” that reroutes traffic through optimised paths. But the do-it-yourself version, using a VPS from a provider like Vultr, Linode, or a smaller Asian host, is cheaper and more flexible.

The catch is that it requires setup. Teo spent a Friday afternoon following a tutorial he found on the r/singapore subreddit, installing WireGuard on a VPS in Tokyo, configuring his router to route only game traffic through the tunnel, and testing the result. The first attempt failed — he had misconfigured the firewall rules on the VPS and his traffic was being dropped. It took another hour to trace the issue to a single line in the iptables configuration. By the time it was working, it was past dinner time. “I was frustrated, hungry, and my wife was annoyed that I’d been at the computer all afternoon,” he says. “But when I launched Valorant and saw the ping, it was worth it.”

The VPS costs him about six dollars a month. His ISP plan costs fifty-nine. He’s paying roughly ten per cent extra for the privilege of routing his traffic the way he wants it routed, rather than the way his ISP routes it by default. That’s a reasonable price for thirty milliseconds, he says — but it’s also an indictment of the entire model.

What the Hosting Providers See

Inside the data centres where game servers actually live, the picture is different. Cloud hosting companies that cater to game developers — providers like Edgegap, GameHosting.co, and the Asian-focused OVHcloud Singapore — optimise their networks specifically for real-time traffic. They don’t use general-purpose transit routes. They peer directly with major ISPs, use anycast routing to reduce hop counts, and place game server instances at the edge of the network, as close to players as possible.

“A game server provider’s job is not to sell bandwidth,” says a network architect at a major cloud hosting company who asked not to be named because he’s not authorised to speak publicly. “It’s to sell a consistent connection. A player in Singapore connecting to a server in our Tokyo location should see no more than sixty milliseconds of latency, ideally less. If they see more, it’s usually because their ISP is taking a bad route — not because our network is bad.”

The architect describes a frustration that his team encounters regularly. They’ll receive a support ticket from a developer whose game is experiencing high latency for Singaporean players. The team runs a traceroute from one of their own machines in Singapore, finds that the traffic is being routed through Los Angeles before reaching Tokyo, and determines that the issue is on the ISP side. They contact the ISP’s peering team. Sometimes, the ISP adjusts the route. More often, the ISP says the traffic will “settle” within a few days — meaning that the BGP route will converge on its own schedule. Meanwhile, the developer’s players are having a bad experience.

This is not a technical limitation. BGP, the protocol that governs how internet traffic is routed, can be configured to prefer certain paths over others. An ISP can announce its routes in a way that encourages traffic to take a shorter path. The fact that many don’t is a matter of economics and inertia, not capability.

The Alternatives That Don’t Quite Solve It

There are consumer-facing solutions that promise to fix the routing problem without requiring a VPS. Gaming VPNs like ExitLag, NoPing, and the aforementioned WTFast claim to optimise routes in real time. They work by bouncing your traffic through their own servers, which are strategically placed at major internet exchanges. In many cases, they genuinely reduce latency — but they add another hop, and they’re a monthly subscription on top of your existing ISP bill.

Then there are the niche ISPs. A handful of small local providers — ViewQwest, MyRepublic, now defunct in some forms — have marketed themselves as “gamer-friendly” at various points, offering direct peering with game server networks and transparent routing policies. These ISPs tend to be better for gaming, genuinely. But they also tend to be smaller, with less redundancy and slower customer support. A friend of Teo’s switched to one of these ISPs and saw a measurable improvement in his ping — but when the connection went down for two days after a cable cut near his estate, he couldn’t reach anyone on the phone. The trade-off isn’t always worth it.

Teo considered switching. He even applied for a plan with one of the smaller ISPs. The installation appointment was scheduled for a Saturday morning. The technician never showed up. Two rescheduled appointments later, Teo cancelled and went back to his original ISP, combined with the VPS workaround. “I gave them a month,” he says. “They couldn’t even install the service.”

What You Actually End Up Doing

For the average player in Singapore, the practical answer to bad gaming latency is neither to switch ISPs and hope for better routing, nor to accept the lag and adapt. It’s to take the matter into your own hands — or to stop playing competitive games altogether.

Teo’s VPS tunnel is not perfect. It adds a small amount of overhead. The VPS itself occasionally becomes a bottleneck if other users on the same hypervisor are saturating the host’s bandwidth. He’s had to reboot the VPS twice in the past six months when the tunnel stopped passing traffic. But for an additional six dollars a month and an hour of setup, he gets a consistent connection that lets him play without the disorienting teleportation that made his afternoons frustrating.

“I’m not happy about it,” he says. “It feels like I’m paying extra because my ISP doesn’t want to do its job properly. But I also don’t have the energy to fight them about it. I just want to play the game.”

He closes the session, shuts down his PC, and the connection ends not with a pronouncement or a lesson, but with the silence of a room where the computer fans have just stopped spinning. The router’s lights continue to blink, indifferent to the path their packets will take. Tomorrow evening, the same problem will be waiting.

📷 Photos: Ei (Unsplash), K8 (Unsplash)