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

[gerhardlazu]

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!

[Jayach]

In my experience 2nd line just have a longer checklist/flowchart. Can't see them helping with latency problems.

Good luck though.

[purrbox]

I managed to get through to an extremely helpful person at voda second line support who escalated it to 3rd line. He took ownership of the issues and liased with 3rd line and city fibre on my behalf.  He ran detailed tests and was able to identify the issue.

It was all going really well until the whole thing was brickwalled by the senior network engineer at cityfibre who believes pings under 100ms are all considered good.

If anybody wants to take it further, you could highlight the fact that city fibre themselves often quote the fact that their service offers lower pings than standard broadband. You could argue that its misleading as their senior network engineer openly states that we should expect pings of upto 100ms on city fibres network.

An easy way to test this is to ping 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1.

If you do it on a standard voda connection it will be under 5ms. If you do it on a city fibre / voda connection, it will always be over 10ms.

[Jayach]

Well I'm on a standard Vodafone FTTC and pings to both Google and Cloudflare DNSs were 17's/18's/19's and one 29.

So if you were getting sub 5ms you were very lucky,

[cr4zy]

So interesting update, while my internet works flawlessly and i've had no issues with Cityfibres connection as mentioned in my last post, the pings were higher than FTTC. Since this week, through no requests of my own, no talk to vodafone or cityfibre about the issue, because honestly the pings were great even for gaming.

This week my ping dropped. Here is a look at my avg google pings that were once through manchester to london, now straight to london it seems.

weekly ping google.co.ukyearly ping google.co.uk

Can't complain about this, connection is still great and no issues. I also havent rebooted my ONT/router in weeks or months even and this just happened without me noticing until i saw this chart today.

[gerhardlazu]

Thank you to everyone that contributed, especially cr4zy & purrbox for their very helpful comments.

I have spent weeks to get to the bottom of this, and now my pings to Fastly LHR (the CDN pop in front of bbc.co.uk) are sub 4ms consistently (they used to be 14ms) and none of my packets are getting lost. I am still using Vodafone + CityFibre for my primary internet connection, but I now also have a secondary FTTP connection with Trunk Networks + BT just so that I can have access to decent support. My internet has never been better.

I have a new router - MikroTik RB5009UG - which really helped with packet loss. Who would have thought that Unifi UDM Pro cannot hold its PPPoE? Well it's true, and now everything works exactly as it should.

I am also running an instance of https://github.com/nefilim/pinger on a wired Linux host, and can tell with a 2s precision when there are ICMP timeouts on the gateway (a.k.a. packet loss). And because I have 2 gateways now, I can compare Vodafone + CityFibre against Trunk Networks + BT. Notice the brief packet loss on Vodafone as I was typing this: 

So what about the change in latency? On the 10th of December, 2021 at 3:38am, this changed for me. It used to be a 11ms to Fastly LHR (the CDN pop in front of bbc.co.uk), and then it changed to 4ms and stayed the same ever since:

This is an mtr to the same endpoint as my original post:

                            Packets               Pings
 Host                     Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
 1. unifi.localdomain      0.0%    51    0.2   0.2   0.2   0.3   0.0
 2. 192.168.88.1           0.0%    51    0.4   0.4   0.3   0.5   0.0
 3. 90.247.64.1            0.0%    50    3.1   3.3   2.4   3.8   0.2
 4. 63.130.105.130         0.0%    50    4.3   4.6   3.8   7.7   0.5
 5. 90.255.251.107         0.0%    50    4.7   4.4   3.7   4.8   0.2
 6. 151.101.0.81           0.0%    50    4.5   4.3   3.2   4.7   0.3

If you are curious about the entire story behind this, tune in: https://twitter.com/gerhardlazu/status/1466528182681620481

[purrbox]

Just bringing this back. It's important that people keep complaining about this.

Tl:Dr. Pings on FTTP gigafast are 10ms higher than standard broadband 

Please also ignore the "solved" solution. It's incorrect, the higher pings are nothing to do with Manchester, it's cityfibre that's adding on the extra latency.

[cr4zy]

And even though mine was much improved for 3-4months, we're back where we used to be unfortunately.

This was after vodafone had 2 days with 12hour issues of downloads outside of their network being <4mbps and packetloss being >25%

So not really sure what work theyve done on the backend to undo 3 months of much better pings and routing....

[purrbox]

How are people finding it now? I'm getting pings over 20ms again.

People need to start complaining again.

If you have gamers in your house, low pings are important, as is correct routing.

[quinindiola]

Hey, same here. MK-based gigafast 900. Public IP geolocated near Glasgow. Ping to 8.8.8.8 stable, 0% packet loss, averaging 24ms!!! 

Routing to bbc.co.uk goes to Aberdeen , then comes back to Watford spending 20ms in the way

What's the best way to start making noise about this? It used to be 8-10ms a few months ago.

[Amanda]

Thanks for reaching out @quinindiola @gerhardlazu - we're continuing to gather examples of this so we can add them to our ongoing case to get these issues resolved.

Please get in touch with my team via Facebook or Twitter, so we can take some further information and if you also include a link to your post you won't need to repeat yourself either 🙂