Well I continued to have intermittent problems with my phones incoming packets so I setup and studied the graphs from a thinkbroadband ping monitor and at the times I was getting most of the problems my pings from the monitor went through the roof, as shown in the example below:

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/47f865e878d...

In this example I was on PTW-AG02 until our town had a powercut. After the power was restored I found myself on PCL-AG08 - I had huge problems that evening and struggled to use the phone at all. I disconnected from this gateway which put me back on PTW-AG02 but I thought I'd try a completely different gateway to see if it made a difference. I'm now on PTN-AG01 and everything is working perfectly.

Apparently Plusnet know about the issue with the gateways and I didn't put the two together... So I'll be watching my gateways like a hawk from now on.

Thanks again for all your help.

Yep. More info at:

http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,1111...
and
http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1362056380.htm

All this talk of gateway congestion is a bit troubling. I don't see this "try rebooting the router to get on a new gateway" advice with other ISPs.

Is this uniquely a Plusnet thing?

I think it would be fairer to say it's part of the diagnostic process to try and get to the bottom of what's really going on. It seems to effect a (often temporary) fix. Seems to be a complex issue, since Plusnet support staff say that measurements on the network don't show up any genuine congestion, yet the symptoms are of severe peak-time congestion for some customers.

My question is more relating to Plusnet's use of "gateways", and the apparent fix of "gateway hopping", which seems to be a Plusnet thing.

For instance, does BT use similar gateways, and is it necessary to gateway hop on BT sometimes?

My understanding is that BTW have 20 WBC nodes around the country to which they backhaul all the 21CN broadband traffic and ISPs connect into 2 or more of those locations. So the ISP would have a gateway router at the other end of each WBC interconnect link. Which gateway your traffic is routed to by BTW is presumably just dependent on load balancing.

No doubt RobertoS can confirm or clarify...

Edit: So yes, BT Retail must also have gateways. Whether hopping between them helps BT customers or not, I don't know. It depends where the problem lies in BT's network at the time.

Edited by deleted (Thu 28-Feb-13 21:45:25)

In reply to a post by Oliver341:

My question is more relating to Plusnet's use of "gateways", and the apparent fix of "gateway hopping", which seems to be a Plusnet thing.

For instance, does BT use similar gateways, and is it necessary to gateway hop on BT sometimes?

Sounds in some ways familiar to the congestion issues with be, where customers changed their routers mac addresses to get a different ip address, with some degree of sucess they also got a less congested vlan /route , Customer's should not have to find work around solutions for the isp's failings end of

Some did warn of plusnet becoming swamped even though they where adamant that they had purchased enough bandwidth to cope a few months ago , I hope we ain't gonna see another case like o2 BE retail in 2011

Edited by tommy45 (Thu 28-Feb-13 21:51:29)

In reply to a post by tommy45:

Acustomer should not have to find work around solutions for the isp's failings end of

True, although as far as I can tell, it's not entirely clear where the failing is occurring at the moment (Plusnet's or BTW's network - allegedly Infinity customers have similar problems at the moment...?)

In reply to a post by Bright:

In reply to a post by tommy45:

Acustomer should not have to find work around solutions for the isp's failings end of

True, although as far as I can tell, it's not entirely clear where the failing is occurring at the moment (Plusnet's or BTW's network - allegedly Infinity customers have similar problems at the moment...?)

Not good,

In reply to a post by Bright:

My understanding is that BTW have 20 WBC nodes around the country to which they backhaul all the 21CN broadband traffic and ISPs connect into 2 or more of those locations. So the ISP would have a gateway router at the other end of each WBC interconnect link. Which gateway your traffic is routed to by BTW is presumably just dependent on load balancing.

No doubt RobertoS can confirm or clarify...

Edit: So yes, BT Retail must also have gateways. Whether hopping between them helps BT customers or not, I don't know. It depends where the problem lies in BT's network at the time.

The WBC nodes and the ISP gateways are not the same thing.

The WBC nodes are where the traffic moves between the "cloud" BT Wholesale backhaul from the exchanges and the ISP's own backhaul, via MSILs. MSILs are (I believe) available in 1Gbps and 10Gbps sizes, and the ISP rents the capacity on them from BTW. (In a similar way to renting capacity on the old 20CN BT Centrals).

A few months ago I believe Plusnet had MSILs at two WBC nodes, but now they have them at three. Plus a couple for ISPC (20CN) at two nodes. (WBC and IPSC traffic cannot share an MSIL, though I think the traffic through the MSILs can be combined on the onward backhaul to PN).

Quite what the Gateways are I don't know, but most of them seemed to be around in the days of BT Centrals, before I was particularly interested in Plusnet. They have to be somewhere the Plusnet side of the MSILs.

The three WBC and two IPSC node loading graphs, plus a combined one, followed by the Gateway loadings, can be seen on this page.

Edited by RobertoS (Sun 10-Mar-13 15:40:39)