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I don't think there's anything wrong with the routing or latency from Manchester. I'm just not sure why they (or cityfibre, or both) are routing me via Manchester in the first place, when I'm 20 miles away from London, in the westerly direction.
Just seems a bit weird and wasteful to do so. If their only peering point with cityfibre is in Manchester, it might make sense. But the other commenter above shows their latency shift from what would make sense for someone in the south routing via London to the same situation I have. So it seems they do have a presence with cityfibre in the south. It's just not being used in my case, for some unknown reason. Makes zero sense to me either,Maybe it's due to city fibre pop's ?
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It looks like City Fibre are terminating your connection at Manchester. It doesn’t look like they are load distributing, nor do we know if they’ll fail you over to London (if it is failover, it’s unlikely reconnecting will help during normal operations). Yes, that was my guess too. But I tried a bunch of things to try and get that to change. But nothing doing. I do wonder why that's the case though.
Once you have reached the Zen network in Manchester, it looks like the first preference for PPPOE is Manchester and London as a failover. You’ve managed to get it to failover, but that’s still going from your location —> Manchester —> London, which leaves you in a worse situation. Well for a while I could hop and get London sometimes. And in that case latency wouldn't change, but speed did seem to improve. Lately it's not possible not to get Manchester BNGs. In fact I seem to go between one of two only now. Having said that, even when connecting to a Manchester BNG routing is still very weird. Many connections to Manchester based services still go Manchester -> London -> Manchester. I guess most peering is in London and that's how it is.
In an ideal world you would route via London, from what you have said. It would be worthwhile to send an e-mail to see if it possible to have some more sensible routing. In the meantime, your best bet is to have your pppoe termination in Manchester. I did email Zen about it. As mentioned elsewhere, I got a very helpful reply that demonstrated they knew about the situation. But, I also got another reply where the next guy didn't even read the entire ticket and simply said the latency is fine and I should just move on. So, it's pot luck who you might get support wise.
But in both cases, it seems there's not much Zen can do. Maybe they should have a mechanism to pass on problems like this to Cityfibre to investigate. I don't think they do right now.
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Makes zero sense to me either,Maybe it's due to city fibre pop's ?
My initial thought was that they only had termination for cityfibre in the north. But I suspect there'd be more complaints if every single cityfibre user on Zen had this issue. There's people way more sensitive to latency than me, for sure.
I think I was somehow assigned to pop out of cityfibre's network in the north. With Zen I remember I used to have a similar problem with VDSL quite some years ago now. For probably a year I would always connect to Manchester pppoe endpoints. Then one day it fixed itself. No amount of support tickets would fix it for me.
Maybe something similar here.
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I would personally get them to escalate it, especially if your speeds are suffering.
Traffic definitely shouldn’t be routing from Manchester —> London —> Manchester —> Internet, someone is definitely up with their internal routing.
Unfortunately, Zen isn’t the company it used to be. Having Manchester was a huge selling point in resiliency, which it is if it’s managed properly, clearly it isn’t.
I personally think this will only get the attention it needs is if the finance team get involved. However, I suspect the transit between London and Manchester is cheap, so it may never get looked at.
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I would personally get them to escalate it, especially if your speeds are suffering.
Traffic definitely shouldn’t be routing from Manchester —> London —> Manchester —> Internet, someone is definitely up with their internal routing.
Unfortunately, Zen isn’t the company it used to be. Having Manchester was a huge selling point in resiliency, which it is if it’s managed properly, clearly it isn’t.
I personally think this will only get the attention it needs is if the finance team get involved. However, I suspect the transit between London and Manchester is cheap, so it may never get looked at. Some parts of the internet used to peer from Manchester , but everything is now peering through london regardless of which of zen's pop's you are connecting to
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Traffic definitely shouldn’t be routing from Manchester —> London —> Manchester —> Internet, someone is definitely up with their internal routing.
I think it is purely down to peering between Zen and other ISPs as to whether the route is seen as cheaper via London or Manchester.
Example. Speedtest Exascale Manchester I get 8ms ping which means it's being routed from Manchester.
Almost all other Manchester speedtests are around 20ms. That means they're routing to London and back again. From my point of view it means it's going South->North->South->North. But it's just down to the combination of bad routing via cityfibre and then the peering between Zen and the network on the speedtest.
So for Exascale in the traceroute I can see they're peering direct at Linx Manchester. But trying IDS Manchester it routes down to ixn-lon on Zen's network then back up to their server in Manchester on IDS's network.
This is not a uniquely IDS thing though. I tried with Vodafone's network (all sites seem to route via London even those in Manchester and further north).
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Traffic definitely shouldn’t be routing from Manchester —> London —> Manchester —> Internet, someone is definitely up with their internal routing.
I think it is purely down to peering between Zen and other ISPs as to whether the route is seen as cheaper via London or Manchester.
Example. Speedtest Exascale Manchester I get 8ms ping which means it's being routed from Manchester.
Almost all other Manchester speedtests are around 20ms. That means they're routing to London and back again. From my point of view it means it's going South->North->South->North. But it's just down to the combination of bad routing via cityfibre and then the peering between Zen and the network on the speedtest.
So for Exascale in the traceroute I can see they're peering direct at Linx Manchester. But trying IDS Manchester it routes down to ixn-lon on Zen's network then back up to their server in Manchester on IDS's network.
This is not a uniquely IDS thing though. I tried with Vodafone's network (all sites seem to route via London even those in Manchester and further north).
This is an interesting conversation, I remember a data centre I used in Germany a couple of decades ago.
This data centre offered a choice of traffic routing standard or premium, the standard option was no extra charge and the default. When looking at the descriptions for the options, they were described something like this.
Standard - routing is cost optimised to have as low cost as possible to ourselves, the standard for how most networks are run.
Premium - routing is latency optimised, this does not assure higher performance.
I do expect Zen route their sessions to give the lowest running cost, and I dont think this would be unusual practice either, Vodafone seem to do the same thing, and I also expect this is how transit/peering is commonly managed across the industry as well. If you have one bit of kit only 10% utilised and another fully utilised, logically a ISP would shift traffic the first bit of kit before adding extra kit at the second kit's location to manage their expenditure.
As a user I think I would personally prefer to have the session in London, as logically thats where most UK internet infrastructure is for peering links CDN infrastructure etc. The way to assure this is to use an ISP that only uses London, but if you in the north or west, there is advantages to what Zen are doing as some stuff can be served locally from these other locations including cloudflare content which would be an advantage.
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Thanks for the detailed reply and it's a shame it hasn't been resolved.
It sounds like you may be fairly close to me, I'm in Maidenhead. My main issue with the routing through Manchester is not really the increase in latency but the fact that my speeds have dropped to the two site to site VPN connections I have in Finland. This is still an ongoing issue.
Their service alert page mentions "Zen Core Network maintenance - BNG" for the next few nights, maybe things will improve soon?!
Having said that, this evening my connection to CityFibre has been completely down for the past couple of hours and no mention of anything on their service alert page. Also rather alarmingly I just realised their technical support ended at 8pm! At least I don't have to worry about where my connections are routing anymore as I have none. 😂
Edited by timo_w2s (Mon 10-Jun-24 20:46:03)
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Yes, not too far. I'm not far from Bracknell.
I'm actually not too fussed about latency either. It's around 18ms to London (it's improved somewhat) and 7-8ms to Manchester. But yes the speed when accessing network resources that involve returning to London are definitely slower especially in working hours. I did some speedtests for this to show the effect.
London (YouFibre) 10/06/2024 at 02:31: 908/926Mbit/s 15ms RTT
London (YouFibre) 10/06/2024 at 13:25: 622/885Mbit/s 13ms RTT
Manchester (Exascale) 10/06/2024 at 13:33: 915/911 8ms RTT
Which is indicative that when the network is quiet, traffic to and via London can achieve the max speed. But during working hours when the network is busy, they don't reach the top speed. However, at that time if connecting to resources that don't run via London can achieve the full speed. Kinda indicates they're feeling some constraints on the link between north and south. That's the real problem. Yes, I'd like a lower RTT but 18-20ms is not bad, and not really causing me a problem.
As for the BNG maintenance. It seems to suggest this might be happening first overnight tonight, and in a couple of days. I'm not too confident it will do anything for us, because it's quite generic (maintenance) and I don't think BNGs are specific to Cityfibre connections. But, we'll see I guess.
For your loss of connectivity. It's all fine over here, and as I'm sure you've checked there's no alert on Zen status for this. So, hopefully nothing too serious there.
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Keep at them, this should be an issue they can resolve.
You shouldn't be seeing this slowdown between Manchester and London, the chances of that link running hot are very slim. The only place it may run hot is between the provider (City Fibre) and Zen, due to the contended nature of the service (due to the high costs of bandwidth at this point).
It could be a genuine fault impacting certain types of traffic within their network.
Kev
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