Johannesburg box for African game servers—latency reality check

Hosting Valheim for ~15 players, mixed EU/Africa. Picked Leaseweb JNB because bandwidth was 40% cheaper than their Nairobi POP. Now my Lagos players report 220ms and I'm the bad guy.

Johannesburg to Lagos: ~220ms
Johannesburg to Nairobi: ~180ms
Nairobi to Lagos: ~85ms

So yeah. I optimized for my wallet, not my players. Skill issue? Absolutely. But also: why is JNB-Lagos this bad? Terrestrial fiber map suggests it shouldn't be. Anyone actually running game servers in Africa with decent west-east connectivity, or is this just the reality until someone lays more cable?

Not looking for "just use Vultr's gaming overlay"—I want to understand the infrastructure.

Thanks for sharing those numbers—unfortunately accurate for many JNB routes to West Africa.

A few things we see at Contabo:

• JNB-Lagos often routes via London or Lisbon due to limited direct peering
• Our Nairobi POP has much better east-west fiber (TEAMS, EASSy landing points)
• For gaming specifically, every 20ms matters—we typically recommend NBO for pan-African latency

I'd be glad to check our internal maps for your specific use case if you'd like to DM me. No pressure either way.

— Jane @ Contabo

BRO YOU PICKED THE WRONG CITY AND YOU ARE SURPRISED!

AFRICA IS NOT ONE PLACE! JOHANNESBURG IS SOUTH! LAGOS IS WEST! THE FIBER DOES NOT GO WHERE YOU THINK! THE BANDWIDTH IS CHEAP BECAUSE NO ONE USES IT FOR THIS!

ALSO VALHEIM NETCODE IS GARBAGE AT 200MS! YOU NEED 100 OR BELOW FOR THE COMBAT! I RUN A CS2 SERVER FROM NAIROBI ON OVHCLOUD AND MY LAGOS PLAYERS GET 90MS! MY NAIROBI PLAYERS GET 5MS! MY JOHANNESBURG PLAYERS GET 180MS!

THE LESSON IS PICK THE CENTER OF YOUR PLAYERBASE NOT THE CENTER OF YOUR WALLET!

ISP optimize for international bandwidth to Singapore, not for neighbor country. The routing to Bangkok is worse than to Tokyo sometimes.

For Africa, I think the undersea cable map is misleading. The cable lands in Lagos, in Mombasa, in Cape Town. But the terrestrial backhaul between landing points is expensive or missing. So your packet goes JNB -> London -> Lagos because London is cheaper than direct path. Check https://bgp.he.net if you want to see the actual paths.

Have you tested from Nairobi? Or maybe host two servers, one for East/West Africa split?

Typical, optimize for cost and eat the latency later