Rogers peering and routing - Cloudflare vs Quad9

[toolcubed]

Hi everyone.

I’m currently using Cloudflare’s “safe” DNS (1.1.1.2) on my 3rd party router, which has been working great so far in terms of speed, performance, and filtering out malware. It’s even faster than Rogers’ DNS.

I also tested Quad9 (9.9.9.9) because they were ranked the best (by a very wide margin) for their ability to filter out malware sites. However, I found their speed to be lacking…they had noticeably higher pings/latency than Cloudflare. Also, with Quad9, I always seemed to be routed through a resolver in the US instead of the local Toronto server. With Cloudflare, I was always routed through their Toronto resolver, which likely explains why they’re faster than Quad9.

Does anyone know if this is because Rogers has better peering to Cloudflare than they do to Quad9?

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[Gdkitty]

Interesting.
Yeah, doing some tracerouts, quad9 is definitely routing down through level3 into new york area.
It does appear that quad9 does have a toronto server... so odd that its resolving down there rather than the toronto one..

[TChilderhose]

I actually just messaged Quad9 about this exact thing. The TL;DR of was Rogers doesn't think Quad9 has enough traffic to warrant Rogers to peer with them at the Toronto Internet Exchange. So yeah, pretty much as you were saying that they have better peering with Cloudflare which is why.

[toolcubed]

Thanks. If that’s true, then it’s unfortunate. I would’ve loved to use Quad9 for their better malware-blocking capabilities. I guess I’ll continue using Cloudflare for now.

[TChilderhose]

Yeah. It sounds like they are working on some additional things to help, but only time will tell.

We are trying to get additional PoPs and connectivity going in Toronto and Montreal, which includes Rogers, but unsure if that's weeks or months.

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They said they will reach out to me if/when the situation changes so I'll reply here when I hear something. I'm going to be sticking with Quad9 personally. My router caches the responses well enough between all the devices that I don't really notice any latency issues.

[toolcubed]

Awesome. Thanks for sharing!