NextDNS is sending me to the other side of the planet

I have been using NextDNS for over 2 years now and I think for the majority of the time it was good but the past few months I felt incredibly degraded performance to most services utilizing CDNs.

This was so obvious specially in iCloud (when uploading, or downloading iOS backups, iCloud Drive, etc). It also affected Google Drive from time to time causing major slow downs.

At first I thought it was my ISP so I ignored it. A week ago I got a new iPhone and wanted to restore from iCloud. It said it would take 36 hours to get done as it was downloading the backup on 100 KBps which is insane being on a 1 Gbps connection! I then changed the DNS to my ISP and it was done in just a few minutes!

I started testing this on other devices and found out that it was not a fluke. I then had some free time today so started comparing DNS responses from NextDNS to that of my ISP and checking what could be causing it. I am in Qatar (Middle East) btw, ISP is Ooredoo Qatar.  I tried against iCloud domains and found out my ISP is sending me to Akamai in Germany (which is acceptable and a very optimized route by my ISP) while NextDNS was sending me to a route handled by Telstra in Australia!

This also explains why I often see traffic heading Australia on NextDNS analytics map which just never made any sense to me. I get under 6 ms to AWS Bahrain, under 7 ms to local Cloudflare POP, under 20 ms to 8.8.8.8, under 20 ms to Microsoft Azure UAE, under 4 ms to anything local. I get 90 to 130 ms to Europe, 180 to 250 ms to US (East/West), 90 to 120 ms to Singapore, 40 to 80 ms to India. I may get just about 180 ms to Australia but the routes to Australia are not optimized at all and will likely not something my ISP care about because virtually no service is exclusively hosted there.

I do not want to leave NextDNS. I am sure it has protected my family several times by blocking access to newly registered TLDs, known malware sites and phishing attempts. I do see this very obvious in the logs so I do not want to lose this protection. I do not want to switch to PiHole/AdGuardHome either as I like the fact I got redundancy with NextDNS and that they got servers in the UAE which give an incredibly low latency to me.