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Milton Keynes routed via Manchester, high latency - Gigafast Broadband 900

gerhardlazu
4: Newbie

My Gigafast Broadband 900 connection that is based in Milton Keynes is getting routed through Manchester instead of London. This means that all data packets go 120 miles north, and then 160 miles south before they can start getting routed to the correct destination.

Latency to bbc.co.uk (London area) is no less than 14ms, instead of 2-3ms:

$ ping -c 10 bbc.co.uk
PING bbc.co.uk (151.101.192.81): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 151.101.192.81: icmp_seq=0 ttl=57 time=14.999 ms
...

--- bbc.co.uk ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 14.359/14.643/15.033/0.213 ms

A service hosted in the Manchester area:

$ ping -c 10 ae5-100-xcr1.man.cw.net
PING ae5-100-xcr1.man.cw.net (195.89.96.113): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 195.89.96.113: icmp_seq=0 ttl=60 time=9.904 ms
...

--- ae5-100-xcr1.man.cw.net ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 9.194/9.976/10.692/0.382 ms

Did anyone else experience a similar behaviour? Did you manage to get it solved? How?

Thanks!

45 REPLIES 45

Anonymous
Not applicable

The last couple of responses here literally made me face palm!

 

Vodafone have a pool of IP addresses that they can issue from, thanks to historic reasons these IPs are arbitrarily allocated to a multitude of different locations.  However, your IP address is issued to the network hardware which your equipment connects to at the datacentre you are routed through.

 

So you could get one of Vodafone old Mumbai IP addresses, but your data would not be routed through Mumbai, but one of Vodafone's UK datacentres.  It's very similar to how your home router allocates dynamic local IP addresses!

 

*There is an amount of virtualising going on here too.  So the last time your data is in its own wire is when it hits the OpenReach cabinet - for FTTP it's even shorter being the ONT/PON!

Bumping thread back up.

I'm glad that others are finding this post useful.

 

I am sharing my current setup, which is working pretty well. After the high latency problem solved itself, I've hit another, far worse problem: high packet loss. I've captured that experience here: https://forum.vodafone.co.uk/t5/Broadband-connection/gt-50-packet-loss-and-a-bad-experience-overall/...

 

After removing the Vodafone-supplied router from my network, everything started working well. Right now, I have no packet loss, and the latency isn't too bad either. I had an mtr to google.co.uk running most of the day, and this is the result:

 

# mtr google.co.uk
                                     Packets               Pings
 Host                              Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
 1. unifi.localdomain               0.0% 18780    0.2   0.1   0.1   1.0   0.1  # Unifi Router
 2. 84.65.192.1                     0.0% 18780    7.5   7.4   7.0  57.0   0.8  # Tamworth, Staffordshire (Vodafone entry)
 3. 63.130.127.221                  0.0% 18780   10.8  11.0  10.6  31.2   0.7  # Vodafone Network
 4. 90.255.251.18                   0.0% 18779   12.1  11.4  10.7 188.8   7.5  # Vodafone Network (Vodafone exit)
 5. 74.125.242.65                   0.0% 18779   13.4  12.1  10.8  20.8   0.9  # Google Network (Google entry)
 6. 142.250.215.125                 0.0% 18779   12.1  11.1  10.7  21.2   0.6  # Google Network
 7. lhr48s27-in-f3.1e100.net        0.0% 18779   13.1  12.3  11.9  21.9   0.6  # Google Network destination, hostname suggests London Heathrow

My worst latency to the Vodafone entry gateway is 57ms, and 7.4ms on average, which accounts for 60% of the total average latency to the final destination (12.3ms). The next hop within Vodafone adds an extra 3ms of latency to the average, and then the Google network adds an extra 0.2ms, for a total average of 12.3ms, as measured over 18779 pings. Yes, my network is fully wired with an average latency of 0.1ms.

 

In conclusion, having experienced massive packet loss after my average latency to google.co.uk dropped to 6ms, I would pick 12.3ms from Milton Keynes to Heathrow and 0% packet loss any day.

Attention MK (and others with high pings on gigafast). 

Look at the 2nd hop on your traceroutes. Notice how it's around 10ms (it should be much less at this stage), that is the latency that is added before it's handed over from Cityfibre to Vodafone. That might not seem like a high number on it's own, but when you add that onto where you're actually pinging it is.

If you compare your gigafast (city fibre) line to a standard vodafone VDSL line you will always see an extra 10ms on your pings. Ping any server and this can easily be proven. Vodafone host their own speedtest.net server so the pings should be 2 - 3 ms but because of the CityFibre issue they are always > 10ms 

I've spoken with an engineer at City Fibre and even he agreed there is clearly an issue, the problem is they can't work on it until Vodafone 2nd line support issue City Fibre with a ticket.

 

As the issue is within City Fibre's network (before it gets handed off to the Vodafone gateway), there's nothing Vodafone can really do apart from send support tickets to City Fibre. 


Please people, encourage everyone to get this escalated. This isn't going to fix the routed by Manchester issue but it will fix the additional 10ms problem, which by looking at your trace routes you all seem to have.

 

I'm sure most people are fine with an additional 10ms, but I personally do a job that requires less than 13ms to the server and I'm sure the gamers here will agree 10ms is a very welcome reduction. On top of this, you upgrade from DSL to FTTH and expect to see lower pings, not higher. Further to this, City Fibre has a whole mission statement on how reducing latency is one of their core objectives of their product, so it's not unreasonable to request this be fixed. In 2021, it's not unreasonable to demand hops from Milton Keynes to Milton Keynes should be a lot less than 10ms, especially when Vodafone seem capable of getting us from MK to telehouse in less than 3ms.

purrbox_1-1625919106963.png

p.s. If you're wondering why I deleted my prior posts, it's because they contained incorrect advise about static IP's.

Anonymous
Not applicable

I think you are being completely unrealistic regards your expectations - the only way you are going to guarantee a sub 13ms (0.013 sec) connection to a server is to be sat in the same room as that server and connected to the same LAN.

 

Primer on Latency and Bandwidth


@Anonymous wrote:

I think you are being completely unrealistic regards your expectations - the only way you are going to guarantee a sub 13ms (0.013 sec) connection to a server is to be sat in the same room as that server and connected to the same LAN.

 

Primer on Latency and Bandwidth


That link you posted is not only nearly ten years out of date but draws it's sources from even older articles. If 13ms to a server was normal (like you say) we would all have pings of > 50ms to our destinations. 

 

Here is a ping to cloudflare, even with the city fibre issue I still get sub13ms. On vodafone standard VDSL (FTTC) the pings to cloudflare are around 4 - 5 ms. It's not normal to have this level of latency inside City Fibre and they have agreed there is an issue.

 

Pinging 1.1.1.1 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 1.1.1.1: bytes=32 time=13ms TTL=58
Reply from 1.1.1.1: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=58
Reply from 1.1.1.1: bytes=32 time=13ms TTL=58
Reply from 1.1.1.1: bytes=32 time=13ms TTL=58

Ping statistics for 1.1.1.1:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 12ms, Maximum = 13ms, Average = 12ms

 

Here is another ping to Google.com, again clearly showing less than 2ms between most hops. If 13ms the best we could hope for, pings to Google.com would be > 70ms. This may have been true 20 years ago, but it isn't today. 

 

1 1 ms <1 ms 1 ms RT-AX92U-6090 [192.168.50.1]
2 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms 90.247.192.1
3 12 ms 84 ms 11 ms 63.130.127.221
4 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms 90.255.251.18
5 12 ms 12 ms 12 ms 74.125.242.97
6 12 ms 12 ms 11 ms 108.170.234.231
7 12 ms 12 ms 12 ms lhr48s29-in-f4.1e100.net [142.250.200.4]

 

As per my previous post, I am not complaining about Vodafones network, it offers very low latency. But the issue at City Fibre means our gigafast lines are at a disadvantage compared to standard broadband. I'm hopeful that City Fibre will be able to fix this. I've seen other City Fibre lines in Milton Keynes that don't suffer from this issue. The City Fibre engineer did mention about ports that the ONT box is connected to or the routing inside their internal network as possible causes. As end users, those additional hops are hidden from our trace routes.

Yeah this is something I noticed upon switching too. I moved from a 80/20 connection that worked pretty flawlessly to vodafone/cityfibre 500/500 and I can't fault the speeds or performance (weirdly enough until tonight I had never had a single disconnect that I was aware of, tonight I have had two... which is how I ended up here)

 

I log a lot of info here's my ping graph for the past year, it's pretty obvious when I switched over from copper to FTTP and well, you'd think it'd get better.

 

This is from Peterborough, i've been conncted to Manchester, Leicester, Birmingham and some others. Would be neat to be connected locally and probably cut a few ms of pointless hops out of the loop.

 

switch.png

The main issue is inside the city fibre network. Even if your routing was improved you would still get that 10ms added on.

 

In the end, I just gave up as they don't see 10ms as a problem.

 

It is annoying knowing the FTTC has lower pings. However, at least it isn't as bad as Virgin Media. 25ms is the lowest ping you can hope for there.

 

As a side note, using Google DNS gives a nice little boost to Web browsing performance, especially in the evenings.

 

Please let us know if you get anywhere with support. That chart that you have gives actual proof that there is an issue, you should get that to voda 3rd line support and gigafast

I learned to live with the higher latency, even in the evenings. The bigger problem is packet loss, which results in 10-20 disconnects after 4pm usually. Today it was so bad, that I could hardly have a video call. More details in this thread: https://forum.vodafone.co.uk/t5/Broadband-connection/Periodic-100-packet-loss/td-p/2695379

 

I usually find myself wasting time with Vodafone support and going through steps that have no relevance. When I say that I don't run the Vodafone provided router, and have a 10Gbit wired network, they don't know what to do with that, and tell me that they can't help, because support does not cover non-Vodafone hardware. Push through that, and a few hours later, I may get my ticket to the right person, and I may get a fix in place, but that will be short-lived. By next week, something else is broken, and I start the process again.

 

At this point, I don't have any expectations from Vodafone support, and simply share my experience, so that it can help other users. Hope it helps!

Level 1 support just follow flow charts. You have to say the right thing so that their charts tell them to pass your call onto level 2. Level 1 support is like a triage service. You have to go through the steps or they won't pass you onto level 2.

 

The easiest way past them is as follows.

1) use official vodafone hardware

2) tell them your Internet is really slow 

3) Go through the diagnosis steps that level 1 give you.

4) When they ask for your speed in mb/s, give a really low number.

 

That will get you to level 2. Once through to level 2, you can discuss the latency issue.