TB Monitor x2

When we are allocated a new I.P, is the previous one allocated to someone else straight away?
The reason I ask is because my line, provided by Sky FU has degraded over the past couple of months. Sky in their wisdom thought by sending a new router this would maybe clear things up. Going by other posts here and elsewhere this is will not be the case.
At 1530hrs (roughly), when I plugged in the new router which took approximately 1hr to sync, my I.P changed.
I went on to the TBmonitor to reinput my details. Since then, both I.P.s are being monitored in my account. Is this normal?
If someone else has got my old ip, I see that they are suffering the same probs as myself at night, but with a better latency, (scratches head).
Thanks in advance.

Old ip

Current ip

Edited by HiPing (Sun 06-Jan-13 13:48:36)

It certainly looks like the IP address has been reassigned very quickly.
And the other person obviously lives far closer to London (in network routing terms), hence the lower latency.

Problem is, my latency was that low before all the problems started. I was relieved when I first saw it, as I thought my latency had dropped back to normal, then I noticed the ip address.

Edited by HiPing (Sun 06-Jan-13 13:23:49)

I would request that you delete (not just disable) the monitor on your old IP.

There are two main reasons for this:

1) if the new owner of that IP attempts to set up a monitor, he/she will get a message saying that it is already being monitored, but they won't be able to see it because it's on your login, and we'll get complaints in TTTS- it's happened before.

2) there is a possibility that the regular ping could be interpreted by the new owner as some sort of probe or potential attack. Apart from causing alarm and despondency, it can easily be traced back to tbb and, again, we get complaints in TTTS.

Ah well, I think only Sky can answer that (but will they?)
Speaking of IP address, it would be better to use the "share snapshot graph" link in the BQM as that produces a graph which won't show your IP address.
I note that from here I can ping the "old" IP address but not the "new" one. Have you disconnected again and changed it?

Apologies for that, monitor has been deleted.

Whoops thought I had. IP address is unchanged.

Edited by HiPing (Sun 06-Jan-13 13:51:45)

No problem, we just prefer to avoid potential ones!

Thanks.

Yes, I think I misread it from the graph - it was visible, but not exactly easy to read. They seem to differ by about 8ms from where I looked. Although i have now closed the tabs so can't see the IPs again
<conspiracy theory>
Of course, the reason the IP address has been reassigned so quickly is because Sky have assigned your old IP to something in a datacentre in London and it's showing much better pings; they hoped you'd then agree that things show as improved in the BQM.
</conspiracy theory>
Yes, I know I'm being silly.

Thanks for the unintentional reminder Bill.
I've deleted my old Be BQM (although they haven't reassigned the IP address yet so no problems caused to anybody).

I could agree with you on the conspiracy theory. The two differing ips show the same problem at the same time, but Sky refuse to admit to me, that there is a widespread problem.

What problem do the ping graphs demonstrate?

Hmmm, if other Sky users could contribute their own graphs, it may be easier to see if it is a widespread problem or not.
Maybe asking in the Sky section of these forums?

What if the "problem" is between TBB and Sky?

That's a question which only needs to be asked if one can show that there is a problem

Are the 2 IP's on the same exchange?
Is the exchange even relevant to FTTC?
Is the problem in the BT network or the Sky network?
These are questions which occur to me.

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

Are the 2 IP's on the same exchange?

I would guess not. To me they look to be in rather separate locations.
Pass on the other questions. I don't think there's enough information from just two graph snapshots.

Replying twice to the same post - if I edit my previous reply you probably won't read it
The two graphs looks like somebody has been downloading for a coupld of hours during the night; I can't see anything else in common between them. What exactly is it that you are trying to show to Sky?

In reply to a post by Uilebheist:

Hmmm, if other Sky users could contribute their own graphs

Given Sky doesn't do static IPs and they *can* (in some occasions) change with every router reboot, its really not recommended. Same issue with BT Infinity which is why I deleted mine. :-/

At approximately the same time 2100hrs-2300hrs both ip's show a large spike in latency.
Checking the history of my monitor this spike has occurred every night for the past week or so. Checking on other forums, users elsewhere are also noticing a large increase in latency and drop in throughput at roughly thist time. Sky just dont seem to acknlowledge that there is a widespread problem, of which I'm certain there is; too many coincidences.

Im trying to demonstrate to Sky that its not just my connection that's running badly.

But I see this almost every night with Plus Net, it's just the busy time, a bit like the rush hour traffic when everybody finishes work.

Although looking now the usual 8pm to around 10pm yellow spike seems to have gone, perhaps they've updated their network capacity to cope with the unlimited packages.

http://community.plus.net/ping-graphs/

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Given Sky doesn't do static IPs and they *can* (in some occasions) change with every router reboot, its really not recommended. Same issue with BT Infinity which is why I deleted mine. :-/

Which is why on Plusnet I forked out a one-off £5 for a static IP. ISPs that charge oodles a month for it are fleecing their customers.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Given Sky doesn't do static IPs and they *can* (in some occasions) change with every router reboot, its really not recommended. Same issue with BT Infinity which is why I deleted mine. :-/

Which is why on Plusnet I forked out a one-off £5 for a static IP. ISPs that charge oodles a month for it are fleecing their customers.

Mind you with Sky Fibre the IP address rarely changes unless the router is switched off for more than 30 minutes. At my last place I had the same IP address for over 3 months until there was a power cut that lasted for nearly an hour.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Given Sky doesn't do static IPs and they *can* (in some occasions) change with every router reboot, its really not recommended. Same issue with BT Infinity which is why I deleted mine. :-/

Which is why on Plusnet I forked out a one-off £5 for a static IP. ISPs that charge oodles a month for it are fleecing their customers.

Yeah, but the big boys (I mean those over 2 million customers) don't even have the option (on consumer tariffs). Have you ever tried to get a static IP or even business connection from Virgin Media to a residential address?!? Nevermind trying to get a set of static IPs for a corporate connection :-/

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Have you ever tried to get a static IP or even business connection from Virgin Media to a residential address?!? Nevermind trying to get a set of static IPs for a corporate connection :-/

I tried that, and they said they don't offer the service.
Now if they offered the service to stop sending people to my door to try to sell their broadband too

In reply to a post by simon194:

Mind you with Sky Fibre the IP address rarely changes unless the router is switched off for more than 30 minutes. At my last place I had the same IP address for over 3 months until there was a power cut that lasted for nearly an hour.

Skyuser was reporting some areas where ADSL people were getting new IPs on a reboot - same occurs to my friend on Sky ADSL next to me. Yes I remember they always were sticky.

I still haven't worked out why with everyone having a router on 24x7 why the ISPs get rid of DHCP and just assign everyone a fixed IP - as AAISP do.

In reply to a post by Uilebheist:

I tried that, and they said they don't offer the service.
Now if they offered the service to stop sending people to my door to try to sell their broadband too

I'll join you in that service! Along with the completely useless junk mail that looks like an important letter sent to "the occupier".

In reply to a post by jchamier:

I still haven't worked out why with everyone having a router on 24x7 why the ISPs get rid of DHCP and just assign everyone a fixed IP - as AAISP do.

I always assumed they are still morally stuck in the days of dialup, when it made sense to have dynamic addresses (although my Demon dialup always had a static IP and proper DNS even back then).

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Given Sky doesn't do static IPs and they *can* (in some occasions) change with every router reboot, its really not recommended. Same issue with BT Infinity which is why I deleted mine. :-/

Which is why on Plusnet I forked out a one-off £5 for a static IP. ISPs that charge oodles a month for it are fleecing their customers.

I agree with you on that, and also ip's are not supposed to be profitable its in the regulations.

BT seem to get round the profit ruling by requiring someone to be on a business package to even be able to order a static ip. That is such a premium that it actually would be cheaper for me to pay my BT contract off and order plusnet to get a static ip than to upgrade to BT business broadband.

To comply with the tbb policy I have deleted the 2 old infinity disabled monitors I had (were disabled). Luckily my line is stable, but if it wasnt a trick that works is to set the ppp timeout on router to 60 seconds, on a normal resync this should maintain the ip address because the ppp isnt reestablished. The downside is the ip profile wont update which may or may not be a problem. This wont work tho if the ppp is dropped for any reason, such as router reboot, changing router settings, manual disconection. I am surprised the government hasnt regulated static ip's yet given how much easier they would make tracking.

Edited by Chrysalis (Mon 07-Jan-13 05:07:13)

What is the actual problem? Looks very like the normal situation for peak times where the network gets a bit busy.

I'd only be panicking if lots of red (packet loss) was appearing.

If an online gamer then the massed market providers are to be avoided if stable 24/7 latency is a requirement

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Skyuser was reporting some areas where ADSL people were getting new IPs on a reboot - same occurs to my friend on Sky ADSL next to me. Yes I remember they always were sticky.

I still haven't worked out why with everyone having a router on 24x7 why the ISPs get rid of DHCP and just assign everyone a fixed IP - as AAISP do.

On ADSL Sky went back to PPPoA so the IP address will change on a reboot 99% of the time. On fibre Sky uses MER which has a 30 min lease time and IP address only changes if the lease expires without being renewed and even then only if the old IP address has been reallocated in the mean time.

On the second point, I guess as more ISPs start supporting IPv6 then fixed IP addresses for all would be a possiblity.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

I am surprised the government hasnt regulated static ip's yet given how much easier they would make tracking.

There wouldn't be enough to go round. And the issue goes away anyway on IPv6.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

There wouldn't be enough to go round.

But if routers are on 24x7 then they are using the IPs all the time, so it doesn't make sense to use dynamic to conserve addresses.

But in general they aren't. Remember, we are geeks.

If you say so.
Just in case IPv6 runs out too quickly, I've just returned 1,209,036,500,079,071,432,015,872 unused IP addresses to Hurricane Electric. Sorry, can't spare any IPv4 address though.

In reply to a post by Uilebheist:

But if routers are on 24x7 then they are using the IPs all the time, so it doesn't make sense to use dynamic to conserve addresses.

I agree with Bob, in general they're not.

If I put my MacBook on a windowsill in an upstairs room I can see anything up to a couple of dozen networks. Around 11pm onwards you can see most of them being switched off...

OK, let me rephrase that.
They need to have enough IP addresses for the peak times when everybody's router is switched on. There is no particular advantage in reassigning these when the routers are switched off for the night.

Edited by deleted (Mon 07-Jan-13 11:37:54)

In reply to a post by Uilebheist:

OK, let me rephrase that.
They need to have enough IP addresses for the peak times when everybody's router is switched off. There is no particular advantage in reassigning these when the routers are switched off for the night.

????

If the router is OFF why will they need an IP address? - A typo I presume.

Yes, thank you for pointing that out. I'd claim that from the context is obvious I mean "on".

Going by those two graphs and previous ones, it seems like everyone is just sat there waiting unitl 2100hrs or thereabouts and "switching on" their internet.
Surely going from a constant ping of 15-16ms at the start to a now constant 29ms (when quiet) but high 90s to mid 100s at certain times, must show some sort of contention issue. Not only is my latency suffering but throughput has been dropped to the mid teens 24hrs a day on a sync of 39996/9996Kb. Sky User and the official Sky forums are now filling up with people posting about the same issues. Sky are not very forthcoming on the problem.

here all wireless are on 24/7, I dont know anyone personally who turns of their router's now days. Its left on like a telephone base is or sky box.

If the green jumped from 15 to 29, then suggests openreach increased the interleave depth, or Sky has a network issue and is sending you several hundred miles around the UK to avoid a bad link in their network.

Latency can seem cliff like due to congestion as the links will perhaps well as they fill up and only once close to full do delays/queuing show up. If it gets really bad there will be packet loss, and it may be that Sky simply manage network to avoid packet loss rather than rises in congestion at all.

There are the ongoing half speed issues some peopple see with Sky, and also Openreach config issues that may be confusing matters more, but reality may be that Sky is happy to run the network hotter than what the customers would like and with a NO traffic management policy they cannot prioritise ICMP and UDP traffic.