Istanbul as Asia-Europe bridge—marketing or real?

Ran traceroutes for 48 hours from 15 endpoints. Contabo Munich, KnownHost Amsterdam, OVHcloud Singapore as controls.

Findings:

• To Europe: 12-28ms, excellent, no surprises
• To MENA: 18-45ms, best in class, this is real value
• To East Asia: 180-340ms, highly variable, worse than Singapore
• To Southeast Asia: 220-400ms, packet loss 2-8% during peak

"Bridge" is accurate if you ignore which direction you're crossing. Provider copywriters love the word. I love facts. Anycast would fix the Asia side but none of these budget hosts run proper anycast. Scrubbing centers in Istanbul are decent. 340Gbps filtered last month during a reflected NTP wave. Not relevant to latency but now you know.

I have server in Istanbul, this is good for Europe users xd but for Asia I have also server in Singapore, no? So I use this for Asia, Istanbul for Europe, simple xd marketing say bridge but this is half bridge, like I have half sandwich, still hungry xd

(danfra with the gentle understatement (or the brutal truth (same thing on this forum (clearly)))) I love how "Asia-Europe bridge" just means "Europe works, Asia incha'allah" (borrowing from moe (who will appear (he always does))). I ran this same test with Hostinger Istanbul last year (don't (seriously don't)) and their routing to Tokyo went... through Frankfurt. Obviously. Because why not make the bridge a U-shape.

I make a server up in Istanbul for Turkish users and is very good, but for Asia I use Singapore. Regards.

In Spanish: o sea, el marketing exagera, vale? Por cierto, mi traceroute a Tokio pasó por... londres. 😊