UK to US Cities

[Qtx]

Does anyone know what US cities have the best connection to the UK latency wise? Is there much difference between UK isp's to those US cities even with the different peering?

Looking to find the best generic town to VPN through for streaming US content from a Sky LLU connection. Obviously different services have different locations so it would be better to change depending in the service but I'm hoping to find a good one size fits all option that can be left connected 24/7 and act as a gateway for other devices.

Not convinced the Level 3 to New York is the best option.

[Pierre]

Considering that there hasn't been a trans-Atlantic cable installed for a decade, and that the ones in place all follow pre-existing routes, then they'll all be pretty much of a muchness.

New lower latency route cables are planned, but are yet to be installed.

So Level 3, which now includes Global Crossing infrastructure, is as good as any.

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by Qtx

Does anyone know what US cities have the best connection to the UK latency wise? Is there much difference between UK isp's to those US cities even with the different peering?

Looking to find the best generic town to VPN through for streaming US content from a Sky LLU connection. Obviously different services have different locations so it would be better to change depending in the service but I'm hoping to find a good one size fits all option that can be left connected 24/7 and act as a gateway for other devices.

Not convinced the Level 3 to New York is the best option.

Latency to New York shouldn't matter for streaming so it's a non-issue. If you can't pull a Netflix SuperHD stream across the Atlantic smoothly it's not latency that's stopping you.

[Qtx]

Cheers for the info. Just assumed some data centres would offer an optimum performance going by what I noticed in the past.

Now i'm back home, made a little script to test average pings to most major hubs, just waiting for downloads to finish so I can run it.

[Ignitionnet]

Packet loss and jitter will be more of an issue for streaming than the average. Look for loss and the standard deviation with the pings, those are more relevant.

[Qtx]

Only a few had large jitter, the majority of them were pretty stable considering the distance.

The lowest ping response from the tests was to a VPN server in Buffalo, New York (assuming the geo-location is correct) with gave 75.7ms. The maximum ping from that server was 76ms, so only a jitter of 0.3ms over 8 pings which is amazing really

Might do further tests at some point to make sure there are no nasty routes to various services from the server in Buffalo.

TINET was the Transit.

traceroute to xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1) 4.058 ms 6.169 ms 6.211 ms
2 * * *
3 ip-89-200-131-94.ov.easynet.net (89.200.131.94) 17.209 ms 15.534 ms 17.476 ms
4 ae1.lon80.ip4.tinet.net (77.67.65.173) 11.965 ms 12.340 ms 42.205 ms
5 xe-0-0-3.nyc20.ip4.tinet.net (141.136.106.41) 80.001 ms 79.883 ms 79.894 ms
6 inforelay-gw.ip4.tinet.net (216.221.158.250) 79.401 ms 75.491 ms 74.980 ms
7 69.169.80.60 (69.169.80.60) 75.819 ms 76.328 ms 77.320 ms
8 cr1.lga2.ir.iniz.com (69.169.84.218) 78.306 ms 78.266 ms 78.363 ms
9 nyc-vz1.xxxxx.com (162.xxx.xxx.x) 78.020 ms 78.030 ms 78.082 ms
10 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) 77.956 ms 77.928 ms 77.899 ms

[Ignitionnet]

Don't panic about hiding who the VPN provider is - content providers will be very aware of their services, as will security services, and finding their IP blocks is trivial. They are tolerated more than actively targeted. It would become a real bum ache messing around denying their small, sometimes single host, prefixes.

TINET / Tiscali International Network are decent enough transit. Way better than McTransit from Cogent.

[Qtx]

Tiscali used to be awful for peering a few years ago, seems they sorted themselves out over time.

My VPN provider is the one I recommend in my signature, so not very well hidden Just giving the results of the test in case anyone else was pondering the same question as me.

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by Qtx

Tiscali used to be awful for peering a few years ago, seems they sorted themselves out over time.

My VPN provider is the one I recommend in my signature, so not very well hidden Just giving the results of the test in case anyone else was pondering the same question as me.

VPN providers actually attract more attention from the powers that be. You can pretty much guarantee an optical tap is feeding your data to Fort Meade.

Yup - the assumption being that if you might be hiding something, you might be hiding something.

Traffic Analysis is not just about content.......

[Qtx]

That goes without saying. I'm under no illusion that they can still unravel things but I have a nice setup with things daisy-chained in such a way that it would make their work a lot harder Explaining it would be counter-productive though. Obviously streaming american content from another country is terrorism and it's the chair for me once they find out!

Generating rubbish traffic for fun alongside torrents and other traffic so data bursts and timing don't leak that i'm looking at lolcat pictures Due to the Snowden leaks the main TOR guy, Jacob Appelbaum got to see the small signature unique to TOR that allowed the agencies to spot the traffic. Last month he made a released which hides those few byte signature so TOR traffic looks identical to SSL traffic again now and hopefully can't be distinguished. The cat and mouse game is turning back in to our favour now we are wiser and code is being checked left right and centre..

[MovedGoalPosts]

Originally Posted by Qtx

My VPN provider is the one I recommend in my signature, so not very well hidden .

Please remove that link. Cable Forum does not allow affiliate links.

[techguyone]

Whats an affiliate link. I looked in FAQ etc and saw no reference to that anywhere.

[MovedGoalPosts]

Qtx thank you for amending your link

Originally Posted by techguyone

Whats an affiliate link. I looked in FAQ etc and saw no reference to that anywhere.

See our T's & C's 3.10

Posts removed. The rules are clear and not up for debate. Back on topic please.