Ping/Latency way higher Gigafast 900

[htyaH]

I used to get 5ms ping to London (from Coventry), now I am being auto connected to Edinburugh and I get 15 ping to there, when I try to speedtest to London or even right next to me in Leicester I am getting pings above 22...I called in and they just said "they added new servers and there's nothing much we can do"...

any help?

[Gerry_Atric]

OK, you're now the 3rd person reporting this that I'm aware of looking at this forum - I've had the same since last week. Instead of being routed through London, I am now going via Manchester which has made my connections very sluggish and liable to disruption when packet losses occur.

It's clearly not just me then, so something wider is going on and VF seem to be quite tight lipped about it. It would be nice to be told if there's improvement works going on or a fault, but there's no service status page I can check.

I did report this to VF and they have raised a ticket with CityFibre for investigation. 

I am sorry you got fobbed off. Did you call the UK based wifi experts team? I wouldn't recommend the chat box at all, I found phoning the wifi experts team to be more productive. 

Also, if you haven't already, do set up ThinkBroadband's Broadband Quality Monitor (BQM) - you need to enable ping on your router in order for this to work. It will show you the changes in latency and also whenever packet losses occur.

If it helps you or anyone else out there, I would recommend putting in your external IP address in this reverse traceroute online tool. It will show you how the routing is working out, that's how I saw it was going via Manchester when it should have been London! https://dnschecker.org/online-traceroute.php

It's all very well when they 'add new servers' to supposedly improve the service, but they need to be assigned to customers based on geographic location! It's no good for someone up North being routed via London nor is it any good for someone like me down South being routed via Manchester. Something is clearly broken and it needs fixing, its impacting performance and reliability.

This really makes CF's marketing look appalling when they promise fast speeds and low latency and how superior it is to providers not using fibre to the home. The performance I am getting at the moment is making virgin media's DOCSIS look superior! 

[htyaH]

Yeah I called the Wifi Experts, and all they told me was they've added new servers. Maybe it's still being all figured out and hence the routes are not optimal, so might take another few days. Someone recommended trying a static IP which I did add and it didn't do anything for me. 

[Gerry_Atric]

In the IT world, when upgrades are done, it usually must work correctly when it goes live. I don't know what VF's internal processes are like, but clearly, this 'upgrade' is not fit for purpose at point of deployment! Was this not tested? Where are the communications? Pretty bad for a multibillion pound multi national! 

[htyaH]

I did the traceroute and I can see for most hops the time taken is very little, but for the last hop on the end it takes >70, perhaps that node(?) is the issue.

[Gerry_Atric]

I suspect that's the gateway in the wrong location for you. I see the same for a gateway in Crewe. It used to be in Slough near London for me!

I've hard reset the ONT, rebooted the router, reconnected on multiple occasions and it's still stuck with the northern gateway! 

I know some folks were lucky when it resolved itself after a few days though some reported it went back to the 'wrong' gateway again!

The problematic gateways for me:

9.|-- ae34-xcr1.ltw.cw.net (195.2.8.45) 0.0% 3 73.5 73.6 73.4 73.9 0.3
10.|-- ae8-xcr1.man.cw.net (195.2.9.98) 0.0% 3 82.8 83.1 82.8 83.4 0.3

[Ripshod]

I've been having the exact same latency issues with the same gateways:

9.|-- ae34-xcr1.ltw.cw.net (195.2.8.45)                               0.0%     3   73.4  73.5  73.3  73.7   0.2
 10.|-- ae8-xcr1.man.cw.net (195.2.9.98)                                0.0%     3   82.6  82.9  82.6  83.1   0.3

Confirms your deduction.

I'm on openreach though so it can't be cf to blame - this is down to Vodafone.

West Yorkshire, since @11am yesterday. 

You can see below when it happened and that I tried a few resets.

[htyaH]

Now how do we get this taken seriously? Do you think they're already aware of this final gateway issue or? The Wifi Experts were useless mostly and just waved me off saying 30 ping is more than fine. Not sure what to do besides wait and hope for the best.

[htyaH]

Mine is 

ae3-xcr1.slo.cw.net (195.2.28.170)                              0.0%     3   73.2  74.0  73.2  74.8   0.8

[Jayach]

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@htyaH wrote:

Now how do we get this taken seriously? Do you think they're already aware of this final gateway issue or? The Wifi Experts were useless mostly and just waved me off saying 30 ping is more than fine. Not sure what to do besides wait and hope for the best.

---

The thing is a ping of 30 is fine, for everybody except gamers. Vodafone are a cheap, no frills provider and all people like me care about is the speed. I've got the best possible connection for VDSL (80/20) and FTTP is only a dream for me for a least a couple of years.

Line Quality

Current Rate

79998 kbps

20000 kbps

[htyaH]

Sure but I was literally on 5 ping the other day, you know? We can do the whole "it's not so bad bla bla thing", of course...but I think it's quite natural to wonder why your ping has quadrupled no? And I do game & stream as well so this is fairly important. Not to mention before I was on Virgin's copper connection which would now mean it had better ping than this VF Fibre. The whole point of fibre is faster transmission, not just the download/upload speeds.

[Jayach]

I feel your pain, I really do. I've been here for 2 years and one thing I have learnt is that Vodafone do not have a clue about broadband. They just rely on Openreach and Cityfibre to do the network stuff. 

[Gerry_Atric]

I think we should wait for comment from VF staff. It's clearly not an isolated issue after all and we've already reported it without much luck, and someone else here on Openreach said they have the same issue. I agree, it's therefore related to a VF issue and nothing to do with the line provider.

If VF continue to ignore our complaints virgin media style then the last resort is to report this issue to the IT press, such as The Register, Think Broadband, ISP Review etc.... maybe some wider press coverage will encourage them to take this more seriously? The lack of communication is what I can't tolerate. Be honest and upfront - if there's an issue and it's going to take a week to resolve, fine, I'll wait. But complete silence is not acceptable! If we wanted to pay for rubbish latency we'd have stuck to virgin media! 

[Gerry_Atric]

Fancy a swap, that's the gateway that works best for me! 

[Gerry_Atric]

The low latency is not only crucial for gamers, but it makes a huge difference to remote working especially with remote desktops. I was getting great performance, almost as if I was on the corporate network itself! But now it's sluggish and will also freeze just like the bad old virgin media days. 

[Jayach]

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@Gerry_Atric wrote:

I think we should wait for comment from VF staff.

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You will get no reply from Vodafone staff on here, except apologies and "contact our team on social media" (for all the good that will do)

[Gerry_Atric]

16th June:

I was on the better gateway, however, packet losses were being registered along with connections dropping around that time

17th June:

I end up on the northern gateway and latency jumps up beyond virgin media levels! 

and today...

[Gerry_Atric]

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@Jayach wrote:

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@Gerry_Atric wrote:

I think we should wait for comment from VF staff.

---

You will get no reply from Vodafone staff on here, except apologies and "contact our team on social media" (for all the good that will do)

---

Time to contact the IT press then!

[htyaH]

Supposedly you can request an engineer if you call the Wifi Xperts team, is anyone able to do so? Maybe having an engineer notified would help since they'd probably be from City Fibre or BT

[Gerry_Atric]

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@htyaH wrote:

Supposedly you can request an engineer if you call the Wifi Xperts team, is anyone able to do so? Maybe having an engineer notified would help since they'd probably be from City Fibre or BT

---

They raised a ticket with CityFibre. I'm not sure what good that would do as it does appear to be an issue beyond CityFibre and Openreach! So it should have been raised internally with their network team. Still no reply for them yet, but they quoted a 72 hour response time.