Well, I had just over a month connected to London before I was put back on Manchester last night. You can see the time it happened on the BQM graph below. VPN speeds to Finland are down by about 30% again and pings are up a bit.

My Broadband Ping

Edited by timo_w2s (Fri 19-Jul-24 08:21:34)

In reply to a post by timo_w2s:

Well, I had just over a month connected to London before I was put back on Manchester last night. You can see the time it happened on the BQM graph below. VPN speeds to Finland are down by about 30% again and pings are up a bit.

Yep, I've not been able to get off Manchester. I do wonder why they don't look into it. It surely cannot be good for them to route people this way.

I had it over the weekend and raised a complaint. It took 4 days to get back on to the london gateway.

I pointed out to them that doubling the latency contradicts their very own gaming page https://www.zen.co.uk/broadband/gaming-broadband/

- "Everyone knows ping is king"
- "Our tech support team is full of gaming experts who know their stuff, and know how to resolve any unlikely technical issues you may find"
- "We are providing you with the best high speed internet."

They spoke to their NOC team who came back and said nothing they can do. Zen then asked me how they could resolve the complaint for me, so I said because I'm out of contract I pay £63 a month and they could lower it to the current £55 a month and they refused.

I then asked them why are they even bothering to ask me then if they are just going to refuse everything. I requested they suggested how to resolve it and they said they would by closing the complaint.

Utterly useless service, complete pack of lies on their website. Tempted to report them to the ASA.

Edited by zebb_edi (Fri 19-Jul-24 11:49:29)

I'm in South Oxfordshire with IDNet (FTTC with Zen backhaul); when I checked this morning my BQM was very similar to yours... I don't know how backhaul routing works, but around 1pm (and more in hope than expectation) I rebooted the router and now everything is back where it should be:

My Broadband Ping

Am new to Zen after many years of waiting for Fibre to be installed in my street.

I have been activated by City Fibre and after the first day of service I raised a support ticket with Zen followed by a complaint for the issue with Latency and speeds all over the place (supposed to be 900/900 symetric).

I have been on many calls with Support now trying to review how to fix this issue.

I am based in Berkshire and use the Bracknell exchange which is over 200 miles from Zen Manchester.
London is less than 50miles from me and it is maddening that I cannot connect via London.

Every time I restart the PPPOE connection I am connected to Zen manchester gateway 51.148.77.130

I havent been able to connect to a London gateway at all.


tracert www.bbc.co.uk

Tracing route to bbc.map.fastly.net [151.101.36.81]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms TUF-AX6000-3718 [192.168.50.1]
2 13 ms 34 ms 28 ms lo0-0.bng3.wh-man.zen.net.uk [51.148.77.130]
3 13 ms 13 ms 13 ms lag-7.p2.wh-man.zen.net.uk [51.148.73.14]
4 14 ms * 13 ms 51-148-244-49.dsl.zen.co.uk [51.148.244.49]
5 17 ms 14 ms 23 ms ldn-bb1-link.ip.twelve99.net [62.115.120.74]
6 22 ms 20 ms 20 ms adm-bb1-link.ip.twelve99.net [62.115.139.144]
7 22 ms 20 ms 20 ms adm-b10-link.ip.twelve99.net [62.115.120.227]
8 21 ms 19 ms 19 ms fastly-ic-319760.ip.twelve99-cust.net [62.115.151.49]
9 22 ms 20 ms 19 ms 151.101.36.81

When I spoke to the complaints team I had said please fix or I will look to change providers as the Latency is twice that of my former Broadband on BT which was copper cables. They have told me as soon as my service was activated my 14 day cooling off period was null and void and I would have to pay the full contract to exit.

I am stuck now unable to know how to escalate this.
I wondered if the routing was a mistake of City Fibre provisioning? but Zen say the latency is fine which is ridiculous IMHO and their latency advertising a lie.
I also had spoken to their sales team prior to ordering and was assured that I would get routed by geography and thus london instead of Manchester given my proximity.

I would have expected that latency and geography would have some bearing on routing but Zen say this is by design and down to load.

Any ideas please? I am not sure technically why this is happening so anyone that can help explain I would appreciate.

cheers

In reply to a post by JHampson:

I am based in Berkshire and use the Bracknell exchange which is over 200 miles from Zen Manchester.
London is less than 50miles from me and it is maddening that I cannot connect via London.

I think I'm either connected to Cityfibre's aggregation point (or whatever they call it) for either Bracknell or Wokingham. So, maybe it's a thing with cityfibre's deployment in this area?

Nothing I've tried which on xDSL would usually give you a chance to be moved back to London has not worked with cityfibre.

I would have thought with every cityfibre connection being up to a gigabit in speed (and potentially soon even faster), they might want to not be wasting their internal capacity with this bizarre routing. But, it seems they have no real interest in solving this.

One difference mind you, is that my first hop in Manchester is usually a bit lower latency:

Text

1 23 45 67

traceroute to 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets  1  zen-gw.[REDACTED] (77.104.[REDACTED])  0.190 ms  0.157 ms  0.144 ms 2  lo0-0.bng3.wh-man.zen.net.uk (51.148.77.130)  7.992 ms  7.979 ms  7.965 ms  3  lag-7.p2.wh-man.zen.net.uk (51.148.73.14)  12.842 ms  12.830 ms  12.880 ms 4  51-148-244-49.dsl.zen.co.uk (51.148.244.49)  12.805 ms  12.854 ms *  5  192.178.98.1 (192.178.98.1)  13.123 ms 192.178.97.115 (192.178.97.115)  14.119 ms 192.178.97.189 (192.178.97.189)  12.672 ms 6  216.239.63.219 (216.239.63.219)  13.068 ms dns.google (8.8.8.8)  12.655 ms  12.632 ms

Edited by agent_r00t (Thu 25-Jul-24 11:51:29)

In reply to a post by JHampson:

Any ideas please? I am not sure technically why this is happening so anyone that can help explain I would appreciate.

Zen routing people in the south through the Manchester gateway has been a bugbear for many many year, they have always refused to accept that it's an issue as they tell everyone its by design. Whoever come up with the design needs to be fired as its a really poor concept.

It has been suggested before that they should have a portal option to specify your preferred gateway and where possible they should route customers through their chosen gateway but as they refuse to accept that it's an issue they will never find a solution to it.

The fact that they have customers in the north going to the London gateway and customers in the south going to the Manchester gateway seems to be lost on them but you can guarantee their devices will be going to the most suitable gateway.

Edited by PCJM40 (Thu 25-Jul-24 12:12:33)

In reply to a post by PCJM40:

Zen routing people in the south through the Manchester gateway has been a bugbear for many many year, they have always refused to accept that it's an issue as they tell everyone its by design. Whoever come up with the design needs to be fired as its a really poor concept.

With cityfibre it's a bit different though. Until around a month ago if I kept reconnecting enough times I would get a London based BNG. But the latency would remain the same (as if it were still going via Manchester, outside the main IP network).

On xDSL if you got the London gateway you would get the lower latency.

For the last month or so it's not even been possible to get a London gateway unless the Manchester ones are down.

I tried raising a complaint, but I never got past their support team, and it was never treated as an actual complaint. As soon as I posted a poor review on trustpilot i've been assigned a complaints manager who is reviewing the case.

In reply to a post by zebb_edi:

I tried raising a complaint, but I never got past their support team, and it was never treated as an actual complaint. As soon as I posted a poor review on trustpilot i've been assigned a complaints manager who is reviewing the case.

And this is the sad state we live in now. Your problem isn't a problem until you make it a public problem.

I'm not imagining it, 10 years ago things weren't like this. Right?

Zen at least support wise, you're going to get pot luck. I had one guy actually read and understand my complaint. He couldn't do a thing about it, but understood and replied politely. When I reply thanking him, another support agent (paraphrased) replied "your ping is fine, go away".

I don't know. If I didn't make use of the netblock I have with Zen, I'd likely move as soon as my contract were up. Not because of the latency (or the lower speeds during peak time associated with this routing), but because I pay more to Zen precisely for the good support I've previously received on the rare occasion I needed help.