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Replying to my own post to say that we got the install done yesterday and so far so good:
- There was a hiccup with the static IP not being assigned but that was resolved in a few hours, with the IP being geolocated in the UK.
- In terms of hops to the few places I've tried, the routes have typically been shorter than Swish with a ms or 2 quicker pings at the destination. That said, more of the routers along the way either don't appear to reply to pings or heavily de-prioritize them.
- The speedtest from work to my own speedtest server has not given cause for concern. Not maximum theoretical rates but faster than Swish and I think there's some throttling going on at the work end.
- And the results from the TBB Quality Monitor are so far showing a drop in average ping times from 12ms on Swish to 5ms on Hey.
I haven't tested gaming yet and I'm curious how things will look over the weekend but I'm pleased with it so far.
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Probably my final post, but the weekend went fine. I did note that the reported ping time to Xbox Live services is averaging 68-73ms, which is a far cry from Swish's 13-15ms and will undoubtedly affect game streaming on the occasion that I use it.
I've raised a ticket but not expecting much in the way of a response. Whether it's worth cancelling the service over I'm thinking probably not seeing as the incumbent is almost twice the price.
But yeah, ultimately Hey appears to be "good enough" for the price and speed on offer. If you rely on super-low-pings you're probably better off looking elsewhere but otherwise it's doing the job.
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Probably my final post, but the weekend went fine. I did note that the reported ping time to Xbox Live services is averaging 68-73ms, which is a far cry from Swish's 13-15ms and will undoubtedly affect game streaming on the occasion that I use it.
I've raised a ticket but not expecting much in the way of a response. Whether it's worth cancelling the service over I'm thinking probably not seeing as the incumbent is almost twice the price.
But yeah, ultimately Hey appears to be "good enough" for the price and speed on offer. If you rely on super-low-pings you're probably better off looking elsewhere but otherwise it's doing the job.
Have you had a play with https://www.azurespeed.com/Azure/Latency, which measures latency to lots of different Azure regions at the same time - might give some clues? (Xbox Live is all hosted out of Azure, so in theory should use the closest region to you)
(For comparison, from t'North of England on Youfibre, I get 17ms to London, 19ms to Cardiff, 23ms to Netherlands, 25ms to Ireland and 94ms to US East)
Edited by daern (Mon 11-Nov-24 11:46:29)
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Ooo, that site's been really useful! Hey support replied to say that they see no issues between them and my ONT so therefore the issue must be with my router settings. I've used the site to compare the two connections, simply swapping the router uplink cable between the two ONTs, and have hopefully provided ample evidence that their routing to Azure is just plain bad.
Skipping to the end, Swish reports the fastest DCs as France, London and Cardiff, while Hey reports Spain(!), Italy(!) and France, with latency to the UK DCs being 2-7 higher than Swish.
I've basically said to let me know if this is likely to see any traction in the near term so that I can decide whether the otherwise very attractive price to throughput ratio is worth the trade off before my cancellation window expires.
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Skipping to the end, Swish reports the fastest DCs as France, London and Cardiff, while Hey reports Spain(!), Italy(!) and France, with latency to the UK DCs being 2-7 higher than Swish.
I've basically said to let me know if this is likely to see any traction in the near term so that I can decide whether the otherwise very attractive price to throughput ratio is worth the trade off before my cancellation window expires.
Ok, well that's just plain rubbish then. Supply them with the evidence from this and ask them to explain why it's quicker to get to Spain and Italy than to the UK for a UK ISP, and if they can't explain this, they don't deserve your business and you should walk away. Give them the tool and get them to use it themselves and report what latencies they're seeing on their core network.
Can you share your actual numbers here? Here are mine for the EU regions.
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Hey have very limited peering and appear to be run from Spain where a lot of their routing goes. The OP was warned of this previously and will need to trade off the price and performance themselves as I doubt Hey are going to change any time soon.
Better Times!
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I was indeed warned of it before, and is most of the reason I ever bothered to test! I can't imagine they'll do anything about it but I figured it's worth asking them at least, while I've got the option of ditching and going back to Swish.
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Please do let us know how you get on. My own highly unscientific observations suggest that Hey sales performance is better than most altnets so maybe the peering issues are something they can live with.
Incidentally, even the guys splicing the local network in my area were Spanish.
Better Times!
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I hadn't seen these Azure/AWS test sites before, so I ran some comparative tests on my connections. I have both HeyBroadband FTTP and TalkTalk FTTC at the moment. Both are running through the same firewall, so it's a relatively good comparative test. HB goes directly from ONT to the firewall, TalkTalk through an openreach modem, the TalkTalk router, then the firewall (so has extra hops/steps).
These tests are from https://www.azurespeed.com/Azure/Latency and https://www.cloudping.cloud/aws. The AWS version of the first one doesn't seem to work properly for me, it shows over 100ms to everything.
| Text | 1
23
45
67
89
1011
| HeyBroadband Azure
Spain Central (Madrid) 40 msSwitzerland North (Zurich) 45 ms
Italy North (Milan) 46 ms
HeyBroadband AWSParis eu-west-3 19.6
London eu-west-2 27.4Stockholm eu-north-1 40.4
Ireland eu-west-1 41.8Zürich eu-central-2 48.4 |
| Text | 1
23
45
67
89
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| TalkTalk Azure
UK South (London) 15 msUK West (Cardiff) 17 ms
France Central (Paris) 20 ms
TalkTalk AWSLondon eu-west-2 7.6
CloudFront CDN 9.6Paris eu-west-3 17.4
Ireland eu-west-1 19.4Frankfurt eu-central-1 22.6 |
This shows the considerable latency and routing difference between the two providers. I'm having TalkTalk FTTP installed on Monday (or at least that's the schedule), so I'll re-run these tests to see if there's much difference between their FTTC and FTTP products for latency.
Edited by Kans (Fri 15-Nov-24 10:06:10)
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This shows the considerable latency and routing difference between the two providers. I'm having TalkTalk FTTP installed on Monday (or at least that's the schedule), so I'll re-run these tests to see if there's much difference between their FTTC and FTTP products for latency.
When I had TalkTalk Biz FTTP I found the latency very good. Not quite as good as via a BT Wholesale based ISP, but only a ms or two different.
Customer service though was another matter. Good luck with them.
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