About a week ago there were significant routing issues between east Africa and Europe. Latency ballooned, and jitter was quite significant too - especially over thr course of the day. I believe both EASSY and one of the semewe circuits were down. I had packets from the U.K. reaching Mozambique via Tokyo.
That was a temporary situation though, and I think the worst I’ve seen in east Africa from the last 10 years.
The argument was “Most routers do not put ping-processing in the "fast path". That is, instead of having the ping be processed by an ASIC, the ping gets processed by the router's CPU.”
That’s meaningless. Control planes are often policed sure, but on overload will simply drop. In my experience they drop icmp to expired before echo response but most will generate ttl expired just fine.
Any router capable of processing a full bgp table, and to be honest any router made in the last 20 years, is perfectly capable of responding to icmp echos.
There was then a second argument that “3rd world” routers aren’t as good as ones in western country. In the majority of cases they’re exactly the same. That western arrogance is somewhere between insulting and amusing.
The final argument is about path loss/jitter/etc, specially loss on the first hop (your “my crappy 3G provider” argument)
That’s exactly what this test of starlink is showing.
Starlink is a great tool in specific cases, but the fanboyish ness often drowns out the actual benefits.
That was a temporary situation though, and I think the worst I’ve seen in east Africa from the last 10 years.