High latency and slow evening speeds (Gigafast 900)

[joshkeegan]

I see I'm not the first to be having this issue, but I'll share anyway...

If anyone has managed to have success in understanding the issue & getting Vodefone to fix it I'd appreciate the help! I have telegraf running on a server and one of the things it's monitoring is ping. I keep 6 months of data, so can share exact timings around the problem. All of the data here is using a wired connection.

I have Gigafast 900 and live in Newport Pagnell. I also have a static IP in case it matters.

Here is my ping to Google (yellow) & Cloudflare (green) graphed over the last 90 days: 

My connection dropped at ~00:17:40 on the 14th of October and came back 2 minutes later with latency doubled (was 10-12ms, now 20-25ms), clearly routing has changed: 

Since then there has been one occurrence of it returning to normal (19th Oct midnight-~4:30) but it has otherwise been consistently worse. It has also been less stable, with evenings seeing large spikes: 

Immediately after the change, each evening also saw significant packet loss, to the point where TV streaming was regularly buffering:

Packet loss in the evenings has improved but otherwise this seems to be persistant. Download speeds are also lower in the evenings (571mbps now at 6pm), with upload speeds still around 900mbps.

Here's a traceroute to Google at the time of writing:

Tracing route to dns.google [8.8.8.8]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  vodafone.broadband [192.168.1.1]
  2    13 ms    13 ms    13 ms  90.247.128.1
  3    23 ms    22 ms    22 ms  63.130.105.134
  4     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  5    26 ms    26 ms    26 ms  216.239.42.41
  6    25 ms    27 ms    26 ms  142.250.215.127
  7    25 ms    25 ms    25 ms  dns.google [8.8.8.8]

This is frustrating, the difference in service is noticable both in the data and also just as a person browing the web. I suspect the answer will be that Vodafone are routing me via somewhere far away and it's oversubscribed so can't keep up in the evenings, but it would be nice to get this fixed... When I first bought gigafast I had a consistent ping of 4-5ms so it feels like performance keeps degrading.

[joshkeegan]

Removed: edited post to include traceroute

[Ripshod]

The traceroute tells us everything we need to know. You like many others are connected to the Edinburgh gateway. Certainly not an ideal situation given your location.

If you use the vodafone router you can confirm this by looking at the status pages, otherwise going to speedtest.net and selecting vodafone's Edinburgh server will give the best ping.

We're victims of load balancing while some massive and apparently endless upgrades are made to vodafone's infrastructure. 

[joshkeegan]

Thanks, I've just tried it and sure enough I get a better ping (13ms) to Vodafone's Edinburgh server on speedtest.

RE router status page, I presume it's the gateway IP? It's 90.247.128.1, same as the first external hop in the traceroute so I guess that is also confirmation of Edinburgh


Do you know if anyone has had luck getting them to change them to a gateway that makes geographic sense? I'm in contract until Dec 2023 or I'd probably just switch.

[Ripshod]

It took them 93 days to fix my problem, if indeed they did fix it and it didn't just resolve itself.

https://forum.vodafone.co.uk/t5/Broadband-connection/Ping-Latency-way-higher-Gigafast-900/td-p/27102...

It's a long read but there's a post from @Amanda in there (2nd page iirc) asking to forward our details via social media. I think it's worthwhile to do just that. 

[joshkeegan]

93 days, ouch. Thought I’d had it for a while but only on day 27 😂

I’ll give that a read and message them, even if just to bump the statistics on the number of complaints this is receiving.

[slowspeedjohn]

I'll go ahead and bet they're going to say there's nothing wrong and that drop in speeds is normal in the evenings.

At least it seems like you can kinda fix the problem in your end by changing router configs, but us phone users are screwed.

My problems started happening on the 26th. Get between 700Kbps and 4Mbps download and 150ms latency. Might as well install Windows98 for the authentic 90s experience.

[Andy]

Hi @joshkeegan 👋 First of all I would like to apologise for the issues you have been facing. We are currently investigating this and working to get any affected customers issues resolved. Once we have any further updates we will make sure to update the thread found on this link.

[gipjon]

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@Andy wrote:

Hi @joshkeegan 👋 First of all I would like to apologise for the issues you have been facing. We are currently investigating this and working to get any affected customers issues resolved. Once we have any further updates we will make sure to update the thread found on this link.

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hi @Andy We are currently investigating this, Is this investigation before or after the investigation on the new customer welcome text/email telling users to log into their account to check that everything is correct and you can't? because you have been investigating that issue for 3 years 

[gipjon]

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@gipjon wrote:

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@Andy wrote:

Hi @joshkeegan 👋 First of all I would like to apologise for the issues you have been facing. We are currently investigating this and working to get any affected customers issues resolved. Once we have any further updates we will make sure to update the thread found on this link.

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hi @Andy We are currently investigating this, Is this investigation before or after the investigation on the new customer welcome text/email telling users to log into their account to check that everything is correct and you can't? because you have been investigating that issue for 3 years 

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many thanks, @Andy for not replying really nice to see Vodafone still treats customers badly 

I'm guessing no reply means it's not being investigated