I think this needs to come to an end! It's affecting our experience, we are paying for something, we spend time on the phone to get nowhere. This needs to stop!
Type of Issue: Routing issue to Oregon or Chicago and other servers from time to time every year. All Riot Games are affected such as Valorant, League of Legends, etc.
Description: In the above screenshot, we are 5 friends who usually play together, our main server is located in Oregon (Portland) because it's the closest server and it's the one we have the best ping. 3 of us are located in Alberta, the people from Calgary will usually have 30-33ms and the players from Edmonton will usually have 35-40ms. There is another person in the group located in BC Vancouver and his ping was supposed to be 20-25ms
Steps to reproduce: Not sure but we noticed that this is happening for a couple of months then come back to normal then back to square one again!
Expected result: Ping to Oregon should be around 30ms, ping to Chicago should be around 45ms. Here is a reminder that we did deal with this type of issue in the past and someone did something: On behalf of the League of Legend - Alberta, Thank... - Shaw Support
Observed result: High ping for everybody that uses Shaw Communication as ISP and also we are unable to create traceroute since we do not have information on the servers. This issue has been reported to Riot but it seems like there is nothing that changed on their ends and we are a bunch of people who complain about this on their support/community. The other players that use the ISP Telus, are not affected by the issue and their pings are even lower!!!
System specs: 5950x, RTX3090, 32GB, Shaw 1GB Fiber
Other: Speed-wise everything is fine, 900mbps download and 125mbps upload but the routing is not efficient and our gaming experience takes a massive hit.
What do we know?
Today, we were a bunch of competitive gamers located in Alberta and BC in an online meeting with a Network Engineer that works for X that gave us some education to explain this situation, and from what we understand, the best platform at the moment for gaming is Telus! Even users that still using copper connection over Fiber with Telus will still have way better ping than Shaw users.
Of course, both ISPs advertise great download speed (better upload for Telus due is the user have Fiber) for fast internet usage but that doesn't do everything since game use way less bandwidth to perform. The most important is the quality of how the connection is traveling from the user's home to the game server location.
What's the difference between Telus and Shaw for gaming?
It's very simple, Telus did communicate that they care about gamers, and with their Telus Esport Series, the company did invest more into PEERING BGP to ensure that connections between multiple different networks have fewer HOPS, making it more directly to the destination, shorter travel, and result to LOWER PING. Telus has access to multiple network borders to enhance the path to the rest of North America and others. On the other end, Shaw did not invest that much into the PEERING BGP, in fact, their connection to westbound will go first to Vancouver and eastbound to Montreal which will worsen the connection travel before reaching a specific destination and will impact the gaming experience and every millisecond matters!
Example:
If we take the game, League of Legends which the server is located in Chicago IL, technically the ping should be around 35-40ms from Calgary, but since the connection has to travel to Montreal (55ms) first which is farther than the main destination, then will travel back to Chicago via a multi-different path, the ping will get higher as result and at the moment we are close to the 80ms. It doubles.
It is the same for Valorant, for those who use Oregon for example, the connection has to go to Vancouver (35ms) first then will take multi-different paths before landing in Oregon PL and will add up an additional 10 to 15ms.
Conclusion:
This has been a great education and I think it's worth sharing, we have seen multiple people on Reddit complaining about this and they should know. I do also understand when we call the Tier1 Support and they are totally lost when we explain this issue and why this gets to frustration since they don't know what do to since they are not aware. At the end of the day, it is sad to see that Shaw did not invest in quality and we know that most people play games online. This is also concerning because it's the way to lose customers especially if they are gamers. I do not have control over this but I hope this topic gives some light to this company.
