When I am at home (comcast internet infrastructure), the packets go to either the att backbone router or the greatoaks.ca router and then cross the ocean to China CNC backbone router (219.158/16). This path is extremely slow due to high latency and high packet loss (almost >80% all the time).
When I am at office, the packets go to the sprintlink.net backbone (144.232/16) and cross the ocean to the sprintlink.net backbone that hosted in china (sl-chinaXX) and then routed to the China CNC backbone router (219.158/16). Since the across-ocean lane is all within the Sprintlink network, the quality is much much better (much lower latency and packet loss).
Now I am wondering if it is possible for me to do anything to let the packets egressing from my home network (comcast) to use the sprintlink BB router path? Would adding route path rules in my home router work? If not, do I have any other choices to improve the network quality at home?
Best Answer
There's really not a whole lot you can do on a purely routing level: you are dependent on whatever routing decisions your ISP has made. Adding routes to your home router won't do anything, as it generally has only one possible next hop into your ISP's backbone.
The only possibility I see, other than swapping ISPs, is to use a VPN or proxy of some sort such that your traffic crosses the comcast network to wherever that proxy or VPN concentrator is, and then hope that the route from that intermedite hop to your final destination is better than the direct path from your house.
Bear in mind though that when routing to destinations in China, there are all kinds of things that can affect the quality of your connection, including traversing the Great Firewall of China, particulary during local peak traffic hours.