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?

[user99]

I phoned Zen and said I want to move to Zen and they did the rest; Zen contacted Vodafone to tell them I was leaving. Vodafone then sent me an email & letter confirming I was leaving. I think it's all part of the new ‘One Touch Switch’ rule. It took 14 days to be connected to Zen, during that time I was still with Vodafone. The changeover occurred at around 1am, I had fitted the Zen router about 12pm of the last day with Vodafone and waited for the changeover. Your idea of phoning Zen will probably be the best way to do it.

[smithy0]

We've also seen this and after spending hours with the customer service clowns I have heard everything from:
-Its a faulty router,
-There are no faults,
-Its not our fault, cityfibre have issues
-There is no speed guarantee at vodafone
-We cant open a ticket, since there is no fault

Meanwhile the reality is that for the past few days, the transient outages that we used to have near bridge of don for maybe a day a year has been going on for weeks:

In all likelihood its a vodafone peering/BGP issue. I have another account with vodafone on cityfibre not in north scotland and that is completely unaffected and I've asked around also. Whats also curious is that when speeds are down to 3mbit/s, if I spin up a VM in a datacentre in amsterdam or warsaw with providers that have peering agreements with networks local to those countries, I can get 300mbit/s+ symmetric with iperf3 - but I cant get more than 3 to vodafones own speedtest server in edinburgh or even netflix.

What drives it home to me is that most of the slowdowns can be mitigated (up to 70-100mbit/s stable) by tunneling all the traffic from aberdeen through another vodafone line on cityfibre in glasgow or nottingham, so clearly theres capacity to spare on vodafones own network! I guess aberdeen customers just arent wanted anymore.

[Ferretchaser]

I've had the same issues in Dyce. Some evenings will be down to 3mbps which is unacceptable on a 900mbps contract. Indian support are terrible but perseverance paid off and I can now exit the contract without penalty. There's definitely some form of traffic shaping going on as my son can ger 400mbps plus using his VPN and bypassing the VF servers.

Signing up with Zen tomorrow.

[user99]

All my posts are instantly deleted - what's up ? Looks like it's working again..

[user99]

Looks like I can post again - good.

Ok, so I ditched Vodafone and have now been with Zen for a month and I've not had any problems, the speeds in the evening do not grind to a halt like they did with Vodafone. The only thing 'bad' about Zen is a very slight 'spikiness' in packet loss reported by BQM every Monday evening, during this 'spikiness' event testing with speedtest.net and packetlosstest.com report no speed reduction or packet loss, also online gaming, web browsing, downloads, etc don't show any problems - don't know why Mondays show this, but I've read that it's something to do with the Fritz!Box router Zen provides and I don't have another router to test this, the old Vodafone routers I have are locked to Vodafone and no fix is available to unlock them.
Here is an image showing Vodafone packet loss in the evening, Zen during most of the week and Zen on Monday. There is also a screenshot of packetlosstest, my previous report of packetlosstest reporting 80ms average latency was an error, I had selected the wrong server 'New Jersey' instead of 'United Kingdom' as the test server, it now shows the correct result of average latency 17ms and average jitter of less than 1ms.
Another good thing about Zen is that there contract is only 18 months and not 24 months as most other ISP's do; there is a month-to-month contract available with at least one ISP but it is very expensive (forgot which ISP).
https://mega.nz/file/N9VgWZRZ#G_yZKVkKJDQv0TZi1xdei8VVykrPp22-VfgeLp6FEBo

[Ferretchaser]

We go live with Zen on 4th November. Yes it's more expensive but I've figured Vodafone are cheap for a reason.

Honestly Vodafone Indian support are absoilutely dreadful, and that's on a good day.

[Annoyeduser71]

Down to 14mbs tonight as I tried to download Black ops 6, Stuck Proton VPN set to Amsterdam, now getting around 300mbs, still not perfect but nearly 20 times what I was getting without the VPN. So annoyed I just 3 months ago, renewed my contract for another 12 months, I think ill be off after this.

[Jayach]

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@Annoyeduser71 wrote:
So annoyed I just 3 months ago, renewed my contract for another 12 months, I think ill be off after this.

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I didn't think Vodafone did 12 month contracts, I thought they were all 24 months.

[Annoyeduser71]

Aye, you could be right, Jayach. I renewed my phone (SIM-only) at the same time, which was 12 months, so that might explain the confusion on my part. I'm getting on a bit, and details slip sometimes. Anyway, it's one reason I don't call the support line.

1. I don't have the patience for them. 'Did you reboot your router?' Seriously, do they think I've gone through all this hassle without rebooting the router?

2. Like others have said, I've heard every excuse in the book, from 'No speed guarantees' to 'It's within spec' (that was with Sky). I used the analogy: you don't buy a 200 mph supercar only to find out it can only do 5 mph at night. I always feel like the person I'm speaking to is insulting my intelligence.

[Ferretchaser]

Just do what I did. Raise a tech support ticket (where they'll come up with every fake excuse under the sun) then escalate it to a complaint. Keep at it and they'll let you out of the contract early.