Aberdeen - dreadful speeds tonight - line congestion?

[jellyman]

On CityFibre 900 and speeds are near unusable. Switched to the mobile dongle and they were even worse.

What is going on?

[RebelRose]

You mentioned an observation about IPs and the fault disappearing - what was that one about? Are you able to elaborate a bit?

[Ripshod]

My gateway (PoP/BNG) is Leeds - 90.246.0.1. On 2nd September I had an IP starting 81.77.***.***. I rebooted the router during that evening's period of high pings, I got a local IPv4 (90.246.***.*** and the latency instantly returned to normal, and it stayed normal until my IP changed away again.

My IPv4 showing the change from 81.77.***.*** to 90.246.***.***

But my IPv6 still had the issue.

Then again. My IPv4 changing from 90.246.**.** to 84.70.***.*** yesterday evening

And IPv6 for the same period

So the chances are if you can drop lucky with a reboot or reconnect and get an IP in the range of your gateway the chance are the latency will behave itself. Please, if you are on fttc don't keep reconnecting or rebooting or you'll likely find DLM will drop your speed.

[RebelRose]

Alright thanks for that. I tried a few reboots but it doesn't seem to affect my gateway, probably need a lot of luck. 

What's interesting is this bad behaviour is very different from before... I used to go down to 1Mbps when the issue was happening. Now I stay in the 500-700 region, but I get 12% packet loss instead.

I'm not really sure how to complain about packet loss to Vodafone, given the speed is still "okay". They likely won't know what I mean. Have you tried bringing it up with them?

Also curious that 4G/5G via Vodafone is still absolutely fine... you'd think they'd share some sort of infrastructure on Vodafone's side, but maybe not.

[Ripshod]

Too late to edit, but i've just rebooted and got a 90.246.***.***. Must buy a lottery ticket.

[RebelRose]

I only ever seem to get the gateway 84.65.192.1, after many many reboots.

My IP either starts with 90.241, 90.240, or 81.79.

Did you notice a way to coax it into giving you a certain gateway, e.g., trying a reboot at a certain time or anything like that?

[RebelRose]

Hm this could be a red herring. I managed to get a gateway AND public IP both starting with 84.65.***.***

However, packet loss is still 13% and speed is even worse at 300Mbps

[Ripshod]

If you didn't already know, 84.65.192.1 is the Birmingham Gateway. If that's nowhere near you then you want to complain about that as a likely cause of any problems you may be experiencing.

There was a big thread on here a couple of years ago about this routing issue. I did participate as I was routed through Edinburgh and experienced all the speed and latency issues. It dragged on for months. A lot of members went through level 1,2 and 3 techs, and the social channels, with no resolution. I just sat back and eventually my problem just sorted itself, whilst those making the loudest complaints were still having problems. 3 months I had to go through that, then after another 6 months it happened again.

Vodafone like to call it "Load balancing".

But I can safely say, despite appearances, It doesn't happen to that may customers. Just enough to sweep under the carpet.

[RebelRose]

Interesting.

Aberdeen to Birmingham shouldn't be the cause of 13% packet loss tho. 

My mobile internet IP is in London, and I can use it to ping a server in Singapore with 0% packet loss.

I imagine some countries are far more spread out geography-wise than the UK too.

There's definitely a difference in the quality of the line depending on your gateway though, but I think that might be regardless of where you are.

[Ripshod]

Mobile networks use up-to-date infrastructure, of mostly fibre and microwave. Vodafone relies on older infrastructure, a lot of older fibre and some copper - some of it inherited from Cable & Wireless - and it's being stretched to it's limits (and beyond). They are upgrading the network but there's still years more work to do. The old network is generally fine over short distances, but not Aberdeen to Birmingham.

I saw 1400ms Latency (that's almost 1½ seconds) and 80% packet loss at busy times when I was connected to Edinburgh. Sometimes my connection would just stall out altogether.

[RebelRose]

My connection dropped last night and I've been switched to Edinburgh funnily enough. If the issue is identical this evening, that'll rule out the distance to the gateway being the issue.