Thanks, that's very promising. I'm all booked in for the 31st so we'll see how it goes!

I had to look up what that is!

I imagine it would have the biggest impact on the number of hops between peered and un-peered networks and hence higher ping times? I don't know how many networks Swish peers with but doing a trace to thinkbroadband.com routes via Amsterdam and back to London.

I'll do some testing while I've got both ISPs installed I guess and see if there's any noticeable impact. Cheers for the heads up.

In reply to a post by Noiz:

I don't know how many networks Swish peers with but doing a trace to thinkbroadband.com routes via Amsterdam and back to London.

Interesting -- I hadn't noticed that before. My connection between Swish and Thinkbroadband also goes via Amsterdam:

traceroute to thinkbroadband.com (80.249.106.141), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 1  192.168.68.1 (192.168.68.1)  0.215 ms
 2  31.22.13.2 (31.22.13.2)  26.348 ms
 3  10.240.10.16 (10.240.10.16)  4.390 ms
 4  10.240.10.251 (10.240.10.251)  4.875 ms
 5  cust-141-195-128-178.jurassic-fibre.net (141.195.128.178)  4.980 ms
 6  172.20.0.76 (172.20.0.76)  5.487 ms
 7  172.20.0.87 (172.20.0.87)  5.049 ms
 8  ldn-b3-link.ip.twelve99.net (213.248.98.36)  5.410 ms
 9  ldn-bb1-link.ip.twelve99.net (62.115.120.74)  5.409 ms
10  adm-bb1-link.ip.twelve99.net (62.115.139.144)  12.598 ms
11  adm-b10-link.ip.twelve99.net (62.115.120.227)  11.245 ms
12  ae-23.a01.amstnl07.nl.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.8.49)  14.386 ms
13  ae-2.r22.amstnl07.nl.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.2.92)  11.020 ms
14  ae-5.r22.londen12.uk.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.5.1)  11.085 ms
15  ae-19.a03.londen12.uk.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.5.245)  11.392 ms
16  192.80.16.146 (192.80.16.146)  11.433 ms
17  te1-51-39.core-rs2.thw.ncuk.net (80.249.97.84)  12.104 ms
18  ip106-141.thw.ncuk.net (80.249.106.141)  11.202 ms

Looks like Swish and NCUK (the network that hosts Thinkbroadband) aren't peered, so the connection goes via Arelion (formerly known as Telia Carrier) and NTT. These are two "tier 1" transit networks. It's not clear why Arelion and NTT exchange the traffic in Amsterdam as they're both present in London (Arelion receive the traffic from Swish in Telehouse North and NTT hand the traffic off to NCUK in "londen12", not sure where that is) -- perhaps someone who knows more about network engineering than me could explain. I suspect this is a more general problem with networks using Arelion to reach NTT in London, and it's probably just temporary.

For comparison Swish peer with Cloudflare at LONAP so my connection is pretty direct (ignoring the relatively large number of hops within Swish's network):

traceroute to cloudflare.com (104.16.132.229), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 1  192.168.68.1 (192.168.68.1)  0.261 ms
 2  31.22.13.2 (31.22.13.2)  3.668 ms
 3  10.240.10.16 (10.240.10.16)  4.557 ms
 4  10.240.10.251 (10.240.10.251)  4.997 ms
 5  cust-141-195-128-178.jurassic-fibre.net (141.195.128.178)  5.112 ms
 6  172.20.0.76 (172.20.0.76)  5.381 ms
 7  172.20.0.87 (172.20.0.87)  4.992 ms
 8  lonap.as13335.net (5.57.81.75)  7.150 ms
 9  141.101.71.97 (141.101.71.97)  5.635 ms
10  104.16.132.229 (104.16.132.229)  5.429 ms

JOI I thought I would do a tracert from my suppler Community Fibre and got a hell of a difference:
Tracing route to thinkbroadband.com [80.249.106.141]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms Community01267.communityfibre.co.uk [192.168.1.1]
2 3 ms 2 ms 2 ms 149.22.149.1
3 3 ms 3 ms 2 ms 94.177.139.39
4 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms xge-0-2-5.ar03.thn.lon.network.as201838.net [94.247.86.34]
5 3 ms 2 ms 2 ms lag-1.edge1.thn.lon.network.as201838.net [94.247.87.53]
6 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 185.59.125.153
7 4 ms 3 ms 3 ms te1-51-38.core-rs1.thw.ncuk.net [80.249.97.82]
8 3 ms 3 ms 3 ms te1-52-37.core-rs2.thw.ncuk.net [80.249.97.81]
9 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms ip106-141.thw.ncuk.net [80.249.106.141]

and to cloudflare:
Tracing route to cloudflare.com [2606:4700::6810:84e5]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 2a02:6b67:e3a1:9600:3223:3ff:fe9e:6fa9
2 3 ms 2 ms 2 ms 2a02:6b60:0:206::1
3 * * * Request timed out.
4 2 ms 1 ms 2 ms xge-0-2-5.ar03.thn.lon.network.as201838.net [2a02:6b60:0:1:1::34]
5 * * * Request timed out.
6 * * * Request timed out.
7 3 ms 2 ms 2 ms 2a02:6b60::2c
8 3 ms 3 ms 3 ms 2400:cb00:21:200::56
9 3 ms 3 ms 3 ms 2400:cb00:736:3::
10 3 ms 3 ms 3 ms 2606:4700::6810:84e5

weird that TB went via IPv4 and CF via IPv6

In reply to a post by The_Voyager:

weird that TB went via IPv4 and CF via IPv6

Not at all weird: thinbroadband.com has no AAAA records.

Not being a techy I had to look that up haha

If it makes a difference in selecting ISPs, SWISH do not support IPv6 or didn't at least.

I'm happy with them overall as service is reliable and I see no signs of contention.
The price has increased slightly from £39 to £42 for 900mbit which is at least locked for 24 mths.
I do pay £3 for a static IP too.

The peering via Amsterdam could explain why the latency to the BQM has jumped from <5ms to 10ms but GeforceNow is still 4ms.

Edited by smouty (Wed 23-Oct-24 09:57:47)

In reply to a post by smouty:

If it makes a difference in selecting ISPs, SWISH do not support IPv6 or didn't at least.

I believe it's been "coming soon" for a while. Hey!BB don't support IPv6 either, although some of F&W's other ISP partners do.

In reply to a post by behuk:

In reply to a post by The_Voyager:

weird that TB went via IPv4 and CF via IPv6

Not at all weird: thinbroadband.com has no AAAA records.

www.thinkbroadband.com does.
This is due to how we set things up with Cloudflare but thanks for sharing. We'll try to fix that asap.

And fixed