IDNet 1GBPS FTTP - Periods of high ping all of a sudden

I've had an IDNet FTTP line running (routed by a UniFi UDM-SE), which has been running absolutely fine up until about 2 days ago, when I've been seeing massive pings for periods of the day. We barely use the line bandwidth wise, if I look at the logs in UniFi, we barely break 20mbps most of the time.

A normal day looks like this:
T-2

-> Absolutely great.

In the last couple of days, we've noticed big latency spikes, and the following:
Today

Yesterday


I've got a smokeping running to various targets, including the nexthop access concentrator at IDNet, which show much the same thing.

Running through diagnostics with IDNet at the moment, who are looking around issues with my routing. All seems absolutely fine otherwise on the routing front (I get a clean speedtest of 920/105, and an A+ on the bufferbloat test, so no lack of grunt on the routing). Is this likely to be a BT PON issue, or an IDNet issue, and how am I best placed to get them to track it down?

I'm almost certain this isn't driven by usage internally - If I take the hour around the period of high latency around 2pm on 21/09, I'm seeing a *max* utilisation of 4mbps down and 1mbps up for the network. Nothings ever really saturated the line to the level that its had any noticeable effect on pings.

Edited by bdav (Thu 21-Sep-23 19:21:16)

Same deal again today unfortunately. It appears to be extremely peak time dependent.

AIUI, the GPON itself is meant to be pretty resilient on the latency front - is this likely to be over contention at the IDNet end? I'm told they don't have any way to investigate this (??)

My Broadband Ping

Ask them who their backhaul provider is between your headend exchange and their network

Hmmm

I know I should not jump to conclusions but lets guess at Zen backhaul...

https://forums.thinkbroadband.com/zen/t/4741674-re-n...
https://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php/topic,27680.0.html

I am indeed on a Zen backhaul they've confirmed.

Do they have a choice / can I get them to switch this out? I was with Aquiss before and never had any contention issues whatsoever, and indeed for most of the time i've had the IDNet connection its been fine.

Edited by bdav (Fri 22-Sep-23 16:12:13)

I would say with almost 100% certainty the issue is with IDNet and/or their backhaul provider, of which they use Zen Wholesale last I heard. Zen Wholesale provision where they can over their own network, if there is no Zen network in your area, Zen will provision over BT Wholesale, but could move you at a later date if their network arrives in your locality.

As alluded to by others, there have been lots of reports of problems with Zen's connectivity, often suddenly starting and coinciding with them having been shifted over to Zen's own backhaul.

It is very unlikely to be a local issue, such as your GPON or kit.

I left IDNet because they used Zen Wholesale and I was on Zens network from my area, and had various issues which IDNet just said I had to accept, so I voted with my feet.

At one time IDNet did allow you to swap to BT Wholesale backhaul, but this stopped being an option some years ago, at around the same time Zen's own customers could no0 longer choose to swap backhaul supplier. Seems Zen Wholesale and Zen decided if their network was an option, they weren't paying extra to run by request over BT Wholesale.

I asked IDNet about swapping to BT Wholesale and got a very definite NO not happening, by all means ask, nothing to lose.

Edited by E300 (Fri 22-Sep-23 16:24:19)

Was that an in-contract termination? I've only been with them for just under a month. I think I'd rather be back with Aquiss than argue the toss!

I've asked about the swap to BTW. Will see what they have to say. I suspect I may be moving onto an in contract termination battle...

Edited by bdav (Fri 22-Sep-23 16:26:56)

It was at the end of the contract I left IDNet. Ironically I did leave Aquiss mid-contract because of congestion problems that couldn't be resolved, all fixed by moving to AA, can't fault them, they might cost more but it was worth it to be free of problems as I use my connection for work.

If your problems are not fixed in a certain period of time you can leave your contract early with an ISP, not sure of the rules or trigger points.

Hopefully it will be something they can fix.

Did they migrate you around the time it stopped working? You still have rights as a consumer, ask them politely to either resolve this in a reasonable about of time (say, a week, that seems fair to me) or they can release you from your contract.

Just a thought, have you tried dropping the connection and reconnecting? You might be sat an hot gateway or router somewhere and reconnecting might get you a less congested route. It was one of things I had to do with IDNet, although never saw a BQM as bad as yours, which is definitely looking like bad congestion.

Edited by E300 (Fri 22-Sep-23 16:39:13)

In reply to a post by jpm:

Did they migrate you around the time it stopped working?

I'm not sure if I was ever migrated, or if its always been Zen backhaul and only just started manifesting itself.

In reply to a post by E300:

Just a thought, have you tried dropping the connection and reconnecting? You might be sat an hot gateway or router somewhere and reconnecting might get you a less congested route. It was one of things I had to do with IDNet, although never saw a BQM as bad as yours, which is definitely looking like bad congestion.

I'll certainly give that a go - Feels like the need for doing that is enough of a problem in its own right, especially seeing as they don't seem to be able to dig into whats happening and why.

No, it doesn't sound good that they can't see what's happening on their own network and that was exactly the impression I got in my dealings with them.

Let us know how you get on.

In reply to a post by E300:

I would say with almost 100% certainty the issue is with IDNet and/or their backhaul provider, of which they use Zen Wholesale last I heard. Zen Wholesale provision where they can over their own network, if there is no Zen network in your area, Zen will provision over BT Wholesale, but could move you at a later date if their network arrives in your locality.

As alluded to by others, there have been lots of reports of problems with Zen's connectivity, often suddenly starting and coinciding with them having been shifted over to Zen's own backhaul.

It is very unlikely to be a local issue, such as your GPON or kit.

I left IDNet because they used Zen Wholesale and I was on Zens network from my area, and had various issues which IDNet just said I had to accept, so I voted with my feet.

I am with E300 on this one. We had single thread speed problems with our ZenW FTTP connection, was not offered any assistance from IDNet support and voted with our feet. Essentially if you have no altnet FTTP connectivity options, then IDNet are single sourced with Zen and don't appear to want to challenge them). We moved to AAISP and all our issues disappeared.

My connection dropped around 12:30 on friday, and seems to have been back to the normal flat pings ever since. I suspect I may have been on a hot gateway.

I'm going to write a little script to log the next couple of hops every so often so I can see it next to the smokepings.

We've been having the same latency peaks problem on an iDNET ADSL circuit since the beginning of last week. iDNET have been helpful and a move to another router at their end gave an improvement, but that has not been sustained. We've had circuits with iDNET for years and usually they find a way round problems in the end. Interestingly an iDNET FTTP circuit of ours, which is just a few miles away from the problem circuit, but with quite different routeing, is showing no problems. My advice to the OP would be to work with them to see if a solution is possible.

All due credit to IDNet and their support, they are very responsive and they’ve escalated it to the suppliers who are looking into it and have set up a smokeping from their end on the line - hopefully that will show something.

Edited by bdav (Tue 26-Sep-23 14:34:33)

On our troublesome circuit changes made by iDNET have so far given us either a circuit with consistent low latency but a few % packet loss or one with negligible packet loss, but severe latency peaks- minimum going up to 100s of ms. Discussions continue.

Investigations still pending, but in addition to odd latency spikes and random packet loss, beginning to see random incredibly slow download speeds on certain hosts / sites in the last couple of weeks.

Downloading a file hosted on US-WEST-2 S3 this afternoon (although have seen it with many websites over the last couple of weeks), on the IDNet/Zen backhauled line seeing 100-120kbps, tethered to a bad 4g connection on my iPhone I'm seeing 650kbps, and using Cloudflare WARP over the IDNet line, I'm seeing 15MBps.

Something very odd happening on one of the hops out of IDNet/Zen semi-regularly.

In reply to a post by bdav:

I've had an IDNet FTTP line running (routed by a UniFi UDM-SE), which has been running absolutely fine up until about 2 days ago, when I've been seeing massive pings for periods of the day. We barely use the line bandwidth wise, if I look at the logs in UniFi, we barely break 20mbps most of the time.

A normal day looks like this:
T-2

-> Absolutely great.

In the last couple of days, we've noticed big latency spikes, and the following:
Today

Yesterday


I've got a smokeping running to various targets, including the nexthop access concentrator at IDNet, which show much the same thing.

Running through diagnostics with IDNet at the moment, who are looking around issues with my routing. All seems absolutely fine otherwise on the routing front (I get a clean speedtest of 920/105, and an A+ on the bufferbloat test, so no lack of grunt on the routing). Is this likely to be a BT PON issue, or an IDNet issue, and how am I best placed to get them to track it down?

I'm almost certain this isn't driven by usage internally - If I take the hour around the period of high latency around 2pm on 21/09, I'm seeing a *max* utilisation of 4mbps down and 1mbps up for the network. Nothings ever really saturated the line to the level that its had any noticeable effect on pings.

Same issue here, I have the IDNet 110X20Mbps FTTP Over Zen backhaul as failover and just cancelled it due to latency issues at random times normally 2PM ish.

Youfibre is more stable overall (yes you might see a lot of peeks but thats me utilizing the link whereas I am not on IDNet.

Just an update to say that the problems we were having were finally fixed in December 2023. Not fast, but they got there in the end, which is why we remain a customer. I don't have information on what the cause of the problem was, but it was said to be "supplier related" rather than on IDNet equipment.