Origin Broadband changing from Vodafone as backhaul supplier

Received text and email today to say that there are changes at Origin Broadband happening Friday as they migrate to a new Back Haul supplier. They are currently Vodafone but does anyone know who the new supplier will be?

Hoping this is to aid improvement to BB Speeds rather than a cost cutting exercise. I have been with them for a long time and to be fair its fine. Although I pay for 80:20 i rarely get above 50 in real word speeds. Even though i am right near exchange..

Anyway fingers crossed as changing all customers to a new supplier is gonna cause a whole heap of problems with people suddenly not having internet and not knowing how to change their login details on router!

Shouldn't need end users to change anything. This sort of change is usually done in batches over time so that problems don't swamp the helpdesk and support people.

Well it shouldn't but they have issued new login and password details to me and others for when it stops working.

My current username has "@originbbltd.vodafone.net" in it. So assume that is the reason it will stop working.

You would hope they are doing in batches but we will see.... I assume i must be in first batch as I can't find any other details of the switch happening with a google search...

In reply to a post by bounderboy:

Received text and email today to say that there are changes at Origin Broadband happening Friday as they migrate to a new Back Haul supplier. They are currently Vodafone but does anyone know who the new supplier will be?

Quite possibly TTB. We've seen a few lines come over internally showing as Origin as the losing partner on TTBs portal.

Matt

Is that talktalk business? If so are they better than Vodafone.. or is it a cost cutting exercise do you think?

It could be for many reasons but as a business we've used then Vodafone network, when it was known as Cable and Wireless Worldwide, for many years and TTB (then Opal) a similar amount of time.

There are reasons why we have not offered Vodafone LLU-based products for supply for over a year now.

Matt

Thank you - fingers crossed all is seamless..

Well the change happened at Midnight and I entered my new details and all connected up ok.

Have lost my static IP Now on dynamic which is real annoying. Had the same IP for at least 3 years. So my plex server and other stuff has stopped remotely working which is annoying.

Good news i seem to be getting 75MB/s as apposed to 30-35mb/s I used to max out at ... Though that is probably as I have network to myself at the moment with lots of people sat with no internet wondering why

Out of interest which provider have they moved you to? (I'm still on Origin/resold Voda)

Dynamic DNS works fine for me.

Same, several connections that I manage have lost their static IP was has caused some real problems with phone systems and other items. Origin we're trying to keep it all on the down-low it seems instead of being upfront about it. Some of the lines are now in the process of being moved away already, bad enough that they fluffed the installs on them, and now this.

In reply to a post by bounderboy:

Have lost my static IP Now on dynamic which is real annoying. Had the same IP for at least 3 years. So my plex server and other stuff has stopped remotely working which is annoying.

Did you have an actual static address or were you just relying on a very 'sticky' dynamic address?

Changing backhaul provider shouldn't have a direct impact on IP address. It will probably require that the PPP session be dropped and reestablished but even a dynamic IP address can survive that if it's sticky enough. A true static IP address should sail through completely undisturbed.

If it's a static address that has changed I'd be inclined to suspect some other general 'tinkering' that your ISP decided to do at the same time as switching backhaul provider which has temporarily left you with a dynamic address. In that case it should be easy enough for them to fix it and put your static address back.

Edited by Andrue (Fri 28-Sep-18 16:26:14)

Thank you it appears I had a very sticky static IP address from a previous plan with them. My current plan doesn't include it grr.. so paying £1.49 for the pleasure.... well it was fun while it lasted

Well I am not sure what it has changed too (if at all) - when I do a speedtest it shows Orign Broadband as supplier now rather than Vodafone. Not sure how I can find out...

The realm you're authenticating against might give us a clue - the part of the username after the @ symbol. I think you'd posted the original vodafone.net one but not the new one they've given you.

It possibly was a true static IP (mine still on Voda is - IP lookup shows static pool etc) but they never charge for it, probably just the contract they had with Voda and in my experience Origin billing etc is a bit (well, very) ad-hoc!

You could also find the "route" your traffic is taking by doing to following (assuming you are on a Windows computer):

Windows Key + R
Type "cmd" then press enter.
type "tracert www.bbc.co.uk" then press enter.

It will take a short while to start showing the route the data takes to the destination with the hops along the way.
The first line is usually your router then the next couple the route through your ISP - the names may give a clue to who the real ISP is, although some names don't get updated when companies get taken over - Voda would show as dslgb.com and various cw.com (Cable and Wireless - bought by Voda).

Not very revealing I am afraid. Why does 2nd hop always timeout - does that indicate a problem.. ?

Tracing route to atsv2-fp-shed.wg1.b.yahoo.com [87.248.98.8]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms 1 ms 9 ms 192.168.1.1
2 * * * Request timed out.
3 12 ms 11 ms 11 ms 145.255.247.206
4 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms 10.0.250.1
5 11 ms 12 ms 11 ms lonap1.yahoo-inc.com [5.57.81.130]
6 22 ms 22 ms 22 ms ae-4.pat1.iry.yahoo.com [66.196.65.152]
7 23 ms 23 ms 23 ms ge-0-3-9-d104.pat1.the.yahoo.com [66.196.65.21]
8 23 ms 22 ms 23 ms eth-1-5.bas2-1-prd.ir2.yahoo.com [217.146.185.180]
9 25 ms 22 ms 22 ms media-router-fp2.prod1.media.vip.ir2.yahoo.com [87.248.98.8]

Trace complete.

In reply to a post by Sherburn:

The realm you're authenticating against might give us a clue - the part of the username after the @ symbol. I think you'd posted the original vodafone.net one but not the new one they've given you.

Also the username is Origin now so no clue there either

Edited by bounderboy (Mon 01-Oct-18 11:23:09)

Hop timing out just means the router is set not to respond to pings, not uncommon and often you will see a lot more that just timeout.

Also if the traffic is tunnelled you may not see the real physical route.

Why not use WHOIS to determine the owner of your gateway IP?

Well the 145.255.247.206 IP is registered to "Team" Origin themselves. I wonder if they are being the "real" ISP/point of presence now.

When I had PlusNet resold and (still) Voda resold from Origin any traceroute and the allocated IP addresses were the respective ISP all the way.

From time to time I have fairly bad congestion (poor single thread) on the resold Voda so hope their new offering performs well for you.

Unfortunately neither the public IP you present as nor the traceroute path will actually tell you anything about the backbone.

You'd expect to see an Origin IP address as the internet breakout will be Origin's (though probably through a third party which may or may not be the carrier they're using for DSL).

You also won't see any traceroute hops prior to the BRAS you're authenticating against, which you'd expect to be Origin's, as everything prior to that is effectively L2VPN traffic*. Hops you see after the first one will either be internal to Origin or part of the path from Origin to open internet.

The origin.something realm would suggest to me that it's likely to be TTB, but that's based on experience that's probably 10 years out of date. I remember when we moved to TTB LLU circuits from TTB-resold ones that we were able to change our realm from @XXX_dslconnect.co.uk (or similar) to @ourdomain.com, because the initial realm routing point was then within TTB's network rather than BT's. We subsequently moved to EE, which was line-based somehow and didn't need a realm at all, but obviously EE is no longer an option for anyone.

*Oversimplification due to it being far too long since I've actually worked on this stuff.

Edit: If you have a router which will show you the output of PPP authentication (eg 'debug ppp authentication' on Cisco) you might see that you're hitting other BRAS which then relay or redirect the request towards Origin. This might give more accurate clues.

Edited by deleted (Mon 01-Oct-18 16:01:39)

Well my internet speed has almost doubled after their changes.. I have and 80/20 line and really only got between 30-45 down . To be honest it never caused any problems at home so didn't really worry about it.. Only when i was getting less than 5mb/s in the evenings did it come a problem.. they had me checking master sockets and such like over and over but I always knew it was congestion as it happened at certain times of day....

Anyway its better now so hopefully will keep me future proof...