This hasn't happened for quite a long time, and when it has I've been able to quickly reconnect and get a Manchester gateway, until today. The connection appeared to drop at around 1am last night and no matter how many times I hit "reconnect" in the FritzBox interface I'm getting a LON gateway. Have they got rid of the MAN gateways? My ping is a lot worse than previously and I don't seem to be able to solve the issue the usual way.

I'm out of contract, and there are cheaper options out there, so if they have stopped using Manchester as a POP then I may as well go with a cheaper ISP that just has POPs in London and save a bit.

Edited by misstuned (Sun 11-Jun-23 13:30:05)

Did you make a note of the Manchester gateways? if so can you ping them?

Yes! The IP of the last Manchester gateway I was connected to is in my FritzBox event log (51.148.77.135) and it's pingable, 17ms away from me currently because of the Manchester-London-Manchester detour.

In reply to a post by misstuned:

Yes! The IP of the last Manchester gateway I was connected to is in my FritzBox event log (51.148.77.135) and it's pingable, 17ms away from me currently because of the Manchester-London-Manchester detour.

I would probably raise a ticket with Zen and have a moan as it does make a big difference.

I wonder if the disconnects are the fritz checking for firmware updates via zen's backdoor account ?

In reply to a post by dect:

In reply to a post by misstuned:

Yes! The IP of the last Manchester gateway I was connected to is in my FritzBox event log (51.148.77.135) and it's pingable, 17ms away from me currently because of the Manchester-London-Manchester detour.

I would probably raise a ticket with Zen and have a moan as it does make a big difference.

I'll do that - obviously they won't look at it until tomorrow (at the very earliest, they've become pretty slow) but I'm still unable to connect to anything but LON gateways. I seem to be stuck on the two gateways at 51.148.77.128 and 129 (both in IXN-LON) no matter how many reconnects I do. I'm pretty close to moving on from Zen because new full fibre options are now available locally from Openreach and CityFibre, so I'll be fairly short in patience with this issue. Moving from VDSL to FTTP will likely lower my ping more than moving my gateway back to Manchester.

Check your Zen control panel to see if it shows a completed order (like a GEA migration).
I'm sure I recall reading that the gateways available to you depends on what backhaul you are on.
If that is the case then a change of backhaul would explain why you can no longer access a particular gateway.

In reply to a post by misstuned:

In reply to a post by dect:

In reply to a post by misstuned:

Yes! The IP of the last Manchester gateway I was connected to is in my FritzBox event log (51.148.77.135) and it's pingable, 17ms away from me currently because of the Manchester-London-Manchester detour.

I would probably raise a ticket with Zen and have a moan as it does make a big difference.

I'll do that - obviously they won't look at it until tomorrow (at the very earliest, they've become pretty slow) but I'm still unable to connect to anything but LON gateways. I seem to be stuck on the two gateways at 51.148.77.128 and 129 (both in IXN-LON) no matter how many reconnects I do. I'm pretty close to moving on from Zen because new full fibre options are now available locally from Openreach and CityFibre, so I'll be fairly short in patience with this issue. Moving from VDSL to FTTP will likely lower my ping more than moving my gateway back to Manchester.

interesting, I'm from the north-west not Manchester but within a 50-60mile radius, and my historic experience was BT wholesale backhaul all traffic was peered from Manchester POP Even transatlantic traffic ,no detour via London, Then i was migrated on to TALK TALK wholesale or tiscali tails , and was routed to London,, Manchester not an option, but pings were the same or 1ms lower On the like's of TBB ping box and consistent too, then later i was migrated onto zen's own or masked backhaul And the mcr gateways were higher in latency over all , the inferion gateway's in london (IXN-LON) has been offering me the lowest latency out of the rest of them Sometimes beating the mcr direct on bt wholsale

In reply to a post by j0hn83:

Check your Zen control panel to see if it shows a completed order (like a GEA migration).
I'm sure I recall reading that the gateways available to you depends on what backhaul you are on.
If that is the case then a change of backhaul would explain why you can no longer access a particular gateway.

That's a good shout, but I've just checked my Zen panel and the only order is the original one for "Unlimited Fibre 1" broadband, no migrations or other orders. I don't really know what's going on, so I've left a ticket in Zen's black hole. I'm going on holiday tomorrow, so I might even have a reply when I get home!

I had the problem of my Fritz box frequently disconnecting (and therefore changing gateway although I've recently within the last ~month been correctly stuck on Manchester when I previously kept bouncing to London) but I found out that this was at the same time as my fritz box updated. I changed the update settings in System -> Update -> Auto Update and now no more issues.