So, i'm in birmingham, and I've also been suffering from this for the last 3 days.
I've been doing lots of testing however, and from what i can work out, it appears to be an issue with GTT.
As many of you will know, if your in birmingham or manchester, your transit goes via GTT manchester to GTT london in most cases. Sometimes it goes via GTT dublin.
Some oddities i've found that you may find interesting below. Please also test these for youself, as i'd love to hear if its a common problem we're all experiencing.
At the moment, speedtest gives be about 15mbps down, and 750 up on my 1000/1000 connection. Fast.com varies between 0.1-3.5mbps.
Interesting Observation 1
I inspected fast.com's test servers. I know there are thousands, but the one i picked out was:
ipv4-c073-lhr004-ix.1.oca.nflxvideo.net
I pinged it, and got 86ms, which is very high considering its london based.
So i traced it. (
[Screenshot]) I've skipped some hops here, but I basically got:
--usual router->bcube->172.16's....
--gtt manchester
--gtt london
--level 3 NEW YORK!!
--netflix dublin
--netflix london
--[target host]
So somethings definitely not right here. birmingham to london is 100miles. my connection is going over 7,000 miles.
Interesting Observation 2
I found a speedtest.net host in the UK, that DOES NOT route via GTT for me. It's "Warwicknet Ltd." in Coventry. I got 200+ down, 450 up. Not great, but still 10 times more than i've been getting in the last 72 hours.
I inspected the connection, and the domain is:
uwsp-speedtest2.warwicknet.com
I traced it, and it appears to be hitting ixmanchester on the hop that usually hits gtt-manchester. It's not using gtt at all! (rare)
Try it out for yourself, and please report back if you too experience a faster connection, and a non-gtt route.
Interesting Observation 3
I was downloading some linux distributions over a popular peer2peer protocol, and obviously, this is going at the equivalent of about 15mbps, sometimes managing a bit more, basically about 1.5-2MBps. Then, all of a sudden, i grab a certain, recent distro i want to download, and I get 100MBps. it's one of the highest speeds i've ever encountered in my 2.5 years of hyperoptic. I take a look at the peers, a fair few random ones in the kbps range, but there's three peers that are delivering double-digit MBps. I quickly made a note of the IPs, looked them up, and they all appear to be based in Amsterdam.
So, i try out EVERY SINGLE speedtest.net host in amsterdam, and i find just one, that gives me above 20mbps. Its called "Usenet.Farm", and I got 540mbps down, 760mbps up. this is 30x faster than the kind of connection i've been getting over the last 3 days.
As usual, I inspect and trace.
The Domain is: speedtest1.usenet.farm
This time, it does still go via GTT-manchester, but the next hop, instead of GTT-London, its GTT-Amsterdam.
Conclusion
In conclusion, i think the issue here is with GTT, on some of their outbound links from Manchster. It clearly affects GTT-Manc->GTT-London. probably dublin too. However, it looks like good speeds can still be achieved via GTT-Manc->GTT-Ams, or without GTT alltogether. This is also evident when using hyperoptics own speedtest, whereby all hops on the trace use their internal network (172.16) and never touch gtt, and therefore deliver full bandwidth.
As far as i can tell, London based hyperoptic users do not use GTT (or atleast, dont have 99% of their traffic routed by GTT like I do), and therefore are likely unaffected by the recent bandwidth issues that we're all facing further north. Most london users get a 1ms ping or less to bbc.co.uk, for example, yet my ping is usually 8ms before i've even left GTTs transit.
I'm sorry for the lengthy post, but I was very frustrated by the lack of information about the issue out there, so hopefully this provides some useful insight to someone, even if it's purely based on my own speculation, and may be completely false. Please try out some of my tests yourself, and report back to confirm.
Thanks,
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