Can you ask Vodafone to change your routing path?

[htyaH]

I stream and game and sometimes notice packet loss or slow packet transmission (?), is there any chance Vodafone can change the path my packets are routed on?

[MarkWeinreb]

@htyaH 

Not possible, I’m afraid. Packet switching is dynamic depending on the current load on the next node. The path taken will therefore always depend on capacity rather than the shortest route. This is to ensure that data packets will always arrive, even if not in order. The receiving station has the job of putting the packets in the correct order which can add to the delay.

[Gerry_Atric]

Whereabouts in the country are you? If you're in the South you should be routed via London, if North it should be via Manchester. I think this is what you're getting at?

I am in the south and since the last couple of days I have been routed via Manchester making my connection have even more latency than I did with VM! 

One can use the traceroute tool here - https://dnschecker.org/online-traceroute.php to see if it goes via Manchester or London.

I suspect there are some issues on VF's infrastructure causing this to happen. I've seen packet losses and random disconnections on ThinkBroadband's BQM - the reconnections end up giving me a new IP address. 

Are you seeing similar issues?

[CrimsonLiar]

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@Gerry_Atric wrote:

One can use the traceroute tool here - https://dnschecker.org/online-traceroute.php to see if it goes via Manchester or London.

Remember that you need to input your own IP address so the traceroute runs back through the net to you!  Otherwise, you are looking at a traceroute from the DNS checker site, to the target site that you enter!

[Jayach]

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@CrimsonLiar wrote:
Remember that you need to input your own IP address so the traceroute runs back through the net to you!  Otherwise, you are looking at a traceroute from the DNS checker site, to the target site that you enter!

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It took me about 10 minutes to work that out. I nearly posted to ask @Gerry_Atric how he was doing it. LOL

[Jayach]

@htyaH 

There have been posts on here where people have said that they get much more consistent (and faster) routing by having a static IP.

If you want to try that use live chat https://www.vodafone.co.uk/bbservcd/ to request one.

[VFbroadbanduser]

Vodafone's DNS servers are definitely overloaded, because of the amount of home broadband customers they have. About 6 weeks ago I started getting issues where every DNS request would timeout or I would have random dropouts, where a device would loose connection unless I either rebooted it or refreshed the network connection settings.

The way I sorted it to change the router DNS server settings to manual and use both Google (8.8.8.8) and Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) DNS servers. It has been working flawlessly again for the last 4-5 weeks.

[Gerry_Atric]

I found it to be quite poor as well and ended up running my own DNS server and things were a lot better until the routing issues cropped up. Now back to square one. I'd probably argue that routing issues are more disruptive than DNS issues. Although you can improve DNS yourself by either changing DNS provider or running your own, routing issues are something you cannot control, only Vodafone. That's a live issue affecting quite a few of us at the moment.

Great suggestion though, hopefully it will inspire folks to check their DNS set up if they are having issues with it.