In reply to a post by miken06:

My problems were resolved the first week of September; it was congestion between MS3 and Squirrel. We’ve had the service for a little over 4 months now and it has been without any major issues.

There have been a few times MS3, or Squirrel have done maintenance overnight; usually at around 2am-4am and as far as I know we don’t get notified ahead of time.

A maintenance period a couple of months ago raised my latency to London/Squirrel by about 1.5ms, I’m not bothered by the increase, but I did wonder if maybe MS3 switched to a new provider for more capacity to get their traffic to London – could be completely wrong but I didn’t think a router/hardware change would cause such an increase and was more likely a longer distance.

Occasionally there can be issues with our IP address, for instance I can't get on bet365 (Web server is returning an unknown error Error code 520; Visit cloudflare.com for more information.). Seems just overzealous blocklists e.g., 23.230.0.0/16 is EGIHosting and Squirrel lease 23.230.54.0/23 so if somewhere is blocking the whole /16 then Squirrel also gets caught up.
To be fair I haven’t raised it with Squirrel or bet365 since it wasn’t me trying to access it.

I use OPNsense with 2 cores of a N100 with 2.5Gbps ports on a 2.5Gbps network, hits ~940Mbps, I haven’t got around to re-enabling IPv6 yet (removed while I had two WANs). I don’t know if it has changed but I did notice IPv6 routing could be a bit weird, if I recall BQM was going something like Cogent London to Paris then back to Cogent London.

Squirrel is a bit odd or maybe it’s normal practise but MS3 came and did the install then Squirrel posts a router, but since I was using my own router I just kept an eye on the ONT lights and the service was activated within a few hours, DHCP on the router and you’re away (had no issues trying different routers, get the same IP, DHCP is on a short 5 minute lease).

Speeds are usually consistent; but they do have a relatively small amount of transit & peering capacity and for the last 2 or 3 popular game releases/updates it has slowed down quite considerably, I guess for there size it’s just not reasonable to have tons of capacity or large ports for bursting if it’s only utilised 1 day every month or two but I’d hope eventually they get to a size were they can make changes to resolve it.

There public peering capacity has slowly increased (LINX 5Gbps, LONAP 4Gbps) but a lot of traffic (including BQM) seem to use the transit providers Cogent (AS174) and Hydra (AS25369) – I couldn’t find a lot of ISPs using Hydra, I’d guess they’re just cheap compared to what others use (typically NTT, Lumen, etc.). Regardless I haven't really experienced any problems with high speeds except the mentioned game release capacity.

BQM does show some packetloss, but I don’t plan on raising it with them, it’s something like 1 packet maybe every 15 minutes sometimes. I see other Squirrel customers with the same, could be a Squirrel router or anywhere in between.

I believe MS3 have continued to have their own congestion problems with their layer 3 platform which I’d suspect is part of the reason they aren’t offering >1Gbps speeds on the network.

Generally, I’m very happy with the Squirrel service and would recommend it to others. Any times contacting support have been excellent, they seem to have knowledgeable staff which I hope they can keep up as they grow. The other reason I went with them was they manage their own network so can do their own capacity planning, peering etc.

Because of the initial problems Squirrel delayed the first month fee, then I believe it is 3 months at £1 followed by £35 for the remainder of the 24-month contract which I don’t think is bad for static IPv4 and IPv6, I think at the time they were the cheapest on the MS3 network and it’s a huge saving compared to what we had out of contract with KCOM.

Remains to be seen what they’ll be able to offer to recontract in ~20 months, hopefully there isn’t a large price jump, I did notice Squirrel over MS3 is much cheaper than their other networks (Gigaclear £49; FibreHeroes £42) so it will probably depend on if MS3 increase wholesale prices.

I think 2.5Gbps is probably a difficult sell especially if like Yayzi it’s 70% more than 940, we’ve been downloading 3-5TB/month, uploads having switched to a symmetrical service the same as without at 5-10% vs download. It’s difficult to see how having ~2.5x the speed would have made any difference to justify such a price increase.

Thanks for getting back glad to see problems resolved, yea i noticed its an of practice of not sending the router till the day after the ONT is installed rather than it being there ready ad waiting for you like practically every other ISP in the UK, but already told them i don't plan on using the supplied router and the same my self will be going direct into my OPNsense setup so it isnt a concern

unfortunately all their offers have ended at time of my order just straight onto £35/pm but im not really too fussed its still cheaper than my VM package lol

i talked to them about the 2.5G package possibility and they say they've have done some testing and ready on their end it is actually down to MS3 to sort their end out, it is a niche product though i agree and wont be for the masses,
I'm just impatient haha i do random projects that require setting up multiple Virtual machines and bulk downloading isos and various VHDs, the quicker i get them the quicker i can get started so on, i also have some servers running in my home lab that do various back up and restores ETC,ive got by with my current connection fine so im in no rush but if it becomes available the option is there right, again i get this is a niche situation but its something id pay for lol, yayzi charge £50 for their 2.4gig package and if squirell was the same id be happy with that, my current virgin gig1 package (1150/110) is £49 so no majour change to my billing really

well glad to see its going well for you they generally have good reviews though they nearly all seem to come from people via fibre heros so nice to get a reply from someone on a MS3 connection

Ash