Three IP Transit Issues

Hi,

Since the early hours of Friday I've been observing issues with my Three 5G connectivity.

I don't think there's actually a problem with my 5G link back to Three, but I think the backhaul at Three may be a bit broken.

At the moment the Think Broadband Quality monitor can't ping my IP and I can't ping it from some VPS I have in various places. During Friday I was observing huge packet loss from one particular VPS while it was OK from some others.

Anyone else seeing some odd behaviour?

I suspect maybe it's a problem with LINX or something.

Mine is well up the creek as well, in Hazel Gove, Stockport. 5G became available on my phone earlier in the week, now only 4G+ showing with an error indicator. My ZTE router is of course not 5G capable and is working with a strong signal but abysmally low speed.

Phone only getting internet via the router.

Yes. It isn't just their 5G, seeing loads of breaks in connectivity to a couple of sites using 4G around the Selby and Thorne (Doncaster) areas. The LTE devices retain their IP addresses, so the lease is being renewed successfully every 30 seconds, but transit breaks.

Thanks for confirming!

I wonder if they actually know. I imagine trying to report that transit is not fully working isn't the easiest thing to raise with the usual support team. Resetting my router isn't really going to help.

I'm based in Durham, not sure how geographical the issue is.

For any connections you have using the '3internet' APN with a pingable public IP, if you wouldn't mind PMing them over to me, that would be handy so I can look at some more traces to see if I can spot a commonality.

I've also had some very strange behaviour with my LTE Three UK connection. APN is 3internet.

I'm not sure what transit issues are, and would be very grateful for an explanation and some means of testing it at my end.

In practice, I'm having issues whereby I never actually lose my internet connection as such, but attempts to access web pages, video streams, etc, will often fail and need to be re-attempted a number of times before they succeed. Bandwidth also seems to have taken a massive (50%) knock.

I've DM'ed Sean with my public IP.

By Transit, I simply mean routing of Internet traffic from one place to another.

All the different networks on 'The Internet' have to connect to each other, they generally use something called BGP (Border Gateway Protocol). All the routers have various routes to others on the Internet, in order of preference. If a route becomes broken, it should be able to re-route via an alternative.

A lot of the traffic going to and from Three seems to use LINX (London Internet Exchange) [https://www.linx.net/]

I have monitoring to my connection form various different servers on the Internet and since Friday I've been seeing packet loss and strange looking routing from some servers but not others.

I don't think I'm quite clever enough to work out what is actually going on, it does however look like something bad is going on and needs fixing!

It got sorted for me late Saturday but went rubbish again some time a bit after 14:30 Sunday. Formula 1 timing screen froze a few minutes before the crash that wrecked the championship. Fortunately I was watching the race on Channel 4 not my usual NOW.

It came back some time later.

Sean, your monitoring sounds really useful. What do you use?

In reply to a post by Jaidee:

Sean, your monitoring sounds really useful. What do you use?

I have a number of virtual private servers with various providers, I run SmokePing on them.

I also recently setup the Think Broadband quality monitor, however that's currently showing 100% packet loss on my Three connection, even though from other networks it's working fine!

The Three 5G Hub supports dynamic DNS, I use no-ip to ensure I have an up-to-date domain which has my Three public IP on.

Cheers!

Any updates on the current situation? Giving serious thought to switching to EE.