BT Infinity FTTC Pings

Hello guys, I am considering moving to BT Infinity from my current provider (BETHERE) however as an avid gamer, I would really like to know what pings some of you are getting who are already on FTTC.

Please can you ping 3 IP's for me and post the results including which area in the UK you are from. Any help much appreciated! Thanks.

IP's

94.76.229.7
94.76.229.13
91.198.152.137

19ms to the first two, 34ms to the last.

Edinburgh, Scotland.

15ms to first two
28 to last

BT Infinity 38 / Manchester / Ashton Under Lyne

20ms to the first two, 34ms to the third.

West Sussex

21ms for the first two, 32ms for the last one

London

11 ms to the first two, 25ms to the last one.

IDNet FTTC, South Oxfordshire.

Hmm... good job you asked me to check...

I'm seeing ~200MS pings just to my router. Urgh... network diagnostics here we go!

Certainly an improvement over my o2/be connection. I don't know what the OP is getting but I'm seeing 24, 27 and 43 respectively.

I've always had lower pings through my exchange (Didcot) than most people with a non-LLU line, I assume I've just got good routing.

Ironic really, because if there's one online activity in which I have no interest whatsoever it's gaming- it gets the gamers hopping mad

In reply to a post by billford:

I've always had lower pings through my exchange (Didcot) than most people with a non-LLU line, I assume I've just got good routing.

Ironic really, because if there's one online activity in which I have no interest whatsoever it's gaming- it gets the gamers hopping mad

Oh, how I would like to swap with you right now...

I get 32-33 for the first couple and cannot get a stable ping on the third at all. Lowest was 56, highest in the 70s. I'm from Aberdeen.

Pings are much higher than with Be, but DLM has enabled interleaving on my line and it's not possible to disable it by getting in touch with BT. It's meant to disable itself on stable lines but hasn't happened with me. This should be a consideration for you if gaming is a priority.

First one 16ms
Second 15ms
Third 30ms

Located Barnet, N London. FTTC with ADSL 24.

DrT

In reply to a post by KStax:

It's meant to disable itself on stable lines but hasn't happened with me. This should be a consideration for you if gaming is a priority.

That's a very good point... otoh, when my line was interleaved for a while the pings were still lower than when I was on copper fastpath!

Edited by billford (Sun 27-May-12 17:49:49)

14, 14 & 28, Northampton on Plusnet FTTC.

1st one 13 ms
2nd one 12ms
3rd one 26ms

SKY Fibre unlimited here. 40mbps download 2 mbps upload.

In reply to a post by billford:

I've always had lower pings through my exchange (Didcot) than most people with a non-LLU line, I assume I've just got good routing.

Ironic really, because if there's one online activity in which I have no interest whatsoever it's gaming- it gets the gamers hopping mad

Has to be some compensation for living in Didcot.

I live in a village near it rather than in it, but it's still a valid point

94.76.229.7 = 6ms min, 6ms average, 8ms max
94.76.229.13 = 6ms min, 7ms average, 11ms max
91.198.152.137 = 19ms min, 20ms average, 21ms max







Ops that was on fibre not FTTC.

31, 31, 65.

from N.Ireland

17ms
13ms
28ms
BT Infinity (80/20 product) in North Oxfordshire

19, 19, 33. That's from a BE connection (Winchester, NOT fastpath).

Reading this thread because I'm thinking of moving to infinity as well (like most of BE who have the opportunity).
I'm more interested in the upload speed than other things.

10ms
9 ms
24ms

BT Infinity 80/20, Maidstone

Adam

Definitely look at the alternatives to infinity too. They are not the only fibre provider. There's Sky, talk talk, plusnet & many smaller providers too...

21ms
21ms
35ms

Plusnet FTTC (40/10), Fife.

14, 15, 28 and all consistent across 40 pings.


BT Infinity (Business) - W London

Edited by MHC (Sun 27-May-12 23:23:22)

Yes, thanks for the comment. I had indeed looked at others, but ruled them out on either price or upload speed.

My pings are high as my connection goes via Ealing and Ilford hop, which triples my ping, 6ms for the hop before ealing and 22+ after.

15, 15 & 28 just now in Sunny Camberwell SE5 with BT 80/20 Connected @ 79992/20000 kps

In reply to a post by StephenTodd:

Yes, thanks for the comment. I had indeed looked at others, but ruled them out on either price or upload speed.

I was also a happy BE customer but took BT Infinity last month and have had a stable 79992/20000 kps connection since, have also changed out their modem + HH boxes for the Fritz! 7390 router/modem box which is much better

With BT CMTET exchange West Mids border Staffs

First one 21ms
Second 22ms
Third Min 124ms Max 1126ms Average 375ms

I switched from BeThere yesterday and am moderately disappointed ping wise. I'm in SW London and was getting a 5ms first hop with 5-7ms to most London based servers.

Now I get a 5ms first hop with FTTC, but it jumps around for 15ms before reaching LINX - so I suspect would get 20-22ms to the IPs below. It's pretty baffling to be honest, where on earth are they routing things?

I'll post some tracerts tonight when I get home from work.

FWIW, I am/was a very keen QW player, so understand the importance of latency in what looks like QuakeLive server IPs?

Yes I am a QuakeLive player, and yeah I fully understand the importance of latency, at the moment I get about 14ms to the first, 19ms to the 2nd and 30ms to the last, every 10ms makes a difference in this game, it starts becoming unplayable for me when its over 50ms so really im looking for maximum 45ms to German servers (as they are the most populated servers in this game).

BTW im from NW England so I guess these are very good pings and it looks unlikely that I would get close to that on BT FTTC, 14ms to most UK servers is what I currently get. On BT it would probably be +15ms to everything I currently have?

24
23
38
Infinity2 N. Ireland

How can you be disappointed with a 5-20ms ping? That's incredibly low and much lower than you need for professional level gaming. If you're not performing well with a 20ms ping then I think you should look at your own gaming skills rather than blaming it on latency 20ms is so small as to be insignificant and I would doubt anyone could tell the difference between 20ms and 5ms as the gap is so incredibly tiny (and insignificant compared to the human reaction time).

There's a few reasons I'm a bit disappointed:

- My ping to London based servers is now 4 times higher than it was before for no apparent purpose. It used to be 5ms with Be and ADSL, now it is 20ms with BT and VDSL2. I'm less than 15 miles from LINX and Telecity, with a first hop of 5ms. How do they manage to add 15ms in 15 miles aside from nonsensical routing? It seems very very inefficient.

- Most QW gaming happens on continental servers - particularly denmark. I use to have about 22-24ms to qw.foppa.dk - this is now 31ms, for no apparent reason.

- Further to the above, QW uses 77hz as its server tick frequency, which roughly correlates to 12ms/25ms/38ms for each frame. Your in game ping will 'snap' to one of these values. So my danish ping used to be 25ms (ie, 2 frames delay) and is now 38ms (ie 3 frames delay). The difference between 12ms and 25ms is minimal. The difference between 25ms and 38ms is noticeable, but OK. 52ms is very noticeable - above this is not so fun.

- Having a bonus 15ms for no apparent reason means I'm more likely to have to play with a ping of 52ms or more on continental servers.

- It's just plain inefficient!

It's not like 20ms is _bad_ per se and it's completely playable, it's just 4 times higher than it needs to be especially considering the distance. And if for some reason in the future interleaving has to be automagically added to my line I'm probably looking at 30ms for UK servers minimum - which I do actually consider quite bad to servers in the same city as me.

I don't really know enough about BT's network to say whether you'd definitely see another 15ms - there are people here posting from much further away than me with the same or lower pings (eg 22ms from Northern Ireland I think, 19ms from Edinburgh). Maybe it's fine up north as there might be fewer opportunities for them to do dumb things on the way south?

Edited by deleted (Tue 29-May-12 12:22:17)

I believe BT has on the order of a dozen BRAS dial-in sites around the country. When your router connects to "the internet", it dials into one of these BRAS "servers" and your traffic gets routed from there, to your ISP's core network and then typically down to London.

Your router would normally pick the first BRAS to respond when it sends out a request. This may or may not be the one nearest you. However you could theoretically (within some limits, which I'm not particularly familiar with) connect to a different BRAS, either by chance or because your primary is down. In my case, the nearest alternatives would be Glasgow, Newcastle or Manchester, none of which are really "further" than Edinburgh anyway, so yes, less opportunity for dumb things to happen.

If you're in London though, and by chance connect to the Newcastle BRAS, your traffic would go London => Newcastle => <various other intermediate hops> => London. That would be stupid. But that could easily be diagnosed on a traceroute, a distant BRAS would show up as your first hop (default gateway) being high, which doesn't seem to be the case for driz. That could also happen with interleaving, which you'd need a hacked modem to rule out.

I'd be interested to see what the traceroutes show.

For the record, on Be (well, old O2 legacy package) I was getting 26ms to London servers and now on BT Infinity I'm getting 18-20ms to the same servers, on the same line. Both connections with interleaving off. VM were managing 16ms minimum ping but an average of 25-30 thanks to record-breaking jitter...

I've added a few of the random hops at the beginning to my hosts file to try and keep track of what these IPs are and when they show up.

Here's a tracert to bbc.co.uk:

Tracing route to bbc.co.uk [212.58.241.131]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms a.router [10.1.1.254]
2 6 ms 6 ms 6 ms slowhop2 [217.32.147.97]
3 6 ms 6 ms 6 ms randhop3 [217.32.147.142]
4 12 ms 11 ms 11 ms randhop4 [213.120.181.142]
5 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms slowhop5 [217.41.169.197]
6 12 ms 11 ms 11 ms slowhop6 [217.41.169.109]
7 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms 109.159.251.235
8 22 ms 27 ms 24 ms core2-te0-13-0-2.ealing.ukcore.bt.net [109.159.251.139]
9 16 ms 22 ms 83 ms peer2-xe10-1-0.telehouse.ukcore.bt.net [109.159.254.116]
10 19 ms 18 ms 17 ms 194.74.65.42
11 * * * Request timed out.
12 22 ms 28 ms 22 ms ae1.er01.rbsov.bbc.co.uk [132.185.254.46]
13 18 ms 19 ms 21 ms 132.185.255.134
14 18 ms 20 ms 19 ms 212.58.241.131

And to the first server in this post:

Tracing route to quakelive.london.i3d.net [94.76.229.13]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms a.router [10.1.1.254]
2 6 ms 5 ms 6 ms slowhop2 [217.32.147.97]
3 7 ms 8 ms 23 ms randhop3 [217.32.147.142]
4 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms 213.120.181.126
5 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms slowhop5 [217.41.169.197]
6 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms slowhop6 [217.41.169.109]
7 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms 109.159.251.231
8 20 ms 19 ms 19 ms core1-te0-12-0-6.ilford.ukcore.bt.net [109.159.251.133]
9 26 ms 23 ms 20 ms peer4te0-1-0-0.telehouse.ukcore.bt.net [109.159.254.54]
10 18 ms 18 ms 18 ms hex89-linx.as29550.net [195.66.236.223]
11 22 ms 20 ms 19 ms vl668.the-7600.as29550.net [92.48.95.10]
12 21 ms 21 ms 26 ms a.1.magic-the.as29550.net [217.112.81.90]
13 18 ms 18 ms 17 ms quakelive.london.i3d.net [94.76.229.13]

Compared with my old Be connect to jolt.co.uk:

Tracing route to jolt.co.uk [84.234.17.86]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms billion.router [192.168.1.254]
2 * * * Request timed out.
3 * 6 ms 6 ms 10.1.2.218
4 6 ms 6 ms 5 ms linx-extreme1.netrino.co.uk [195.66.227.18]
5 6 ms 5 ms 6 ms thn-edge.netrino.co.uk [84.234.19.142]
6 6 ms 5 ms 5 ms hex-edge.netrino.co.uk [84.234.19.146]
7 7 ms 7 ms 6 ms bs1-core.netrino.co.uk [84.234.19.5]
8 7 ms 7 ms 6 ms bruce.ferrago.net [84.234.17.86]

Going to try rebooting the router/restarting the PPPoE session to see what happens.