The contention doesn't appear every day here; it generally appears on a Tuesday, but it has been known to appear on random days during the week.

Seeing high latency here now
My Broadband Ping

Thank you to everyone contributing to this topic. Tuesday here too, looks like this day of the week is also a problem for people in different parts of the country. To quote Gibbs from NCIS: Rule 39 states, “There’s no such thing as a coincidence.”

Could this indicate that it is a more central issue, perhaps with GCs core network/bandwidth? Would all of the areas where GC have deployed fibre converge to a central point or would there be regional connectivity. I don't have any real knowledge in this area but I do know that every ISP has to connect back to the main backbone of the internet somewhere.

I've kept our Zen ADSL line as a backup too for when there are GC outages, this is only 5 Mbps due to line length (no FTTC here) so not worth failing over at those speeds.

Slightly off topic, but we were one of the last exchanges to get ADSL after triggering the registration requirement before BT closed that scheme and just rolled out ADSL everywhere. I had a website promoting registration and went around leaflet dropping desperate to get ADSL in our village to replace the BT HomeHighway (ISDN) connection.

In reply to a post by DatabaseJase:

Thank you to everyone contributing to this topic. Tuesday here too, looks like this day of the week is also a problem for people in different parts of the country. To quote Gibbs from NCIS: Rule 39 states, “There’s no such thing as a coincidence.”

Could this indicate that it is a more central issue, perhaps with GCs core network/bandwidth? Would all of the areas where GC have deployed fibre converge to a central point or would there be regional connectivity. I don't have any real knowledge in this area but I do know that every ISP has to connect back to the main backbone of the internet somewhere.

I've had an email from Gigaclear this morning in response to my ticket. They are setting up a ping monitor to the node in the Tiptree/Kelvedon/Feering area to monitor for the next 72 hours. The agent who emailed me stated that the senior on shift technical support said it looks like there is an issue and they will monitor over the coming days.

I believe that our connections head back towards Northampton from here, as whenever there are big issues in Northampton, we see some issues here in Essex. Could just be a coinecidence though.

I'm also based in Tiptree and recently had a visit from a Gigaclear fibre engineer who was really helpful. He confirmed that the fibre connection from the cabinet to the kerb, from the kerb to the outside of the house, and from the outside to inside the house were all working perfectly.

Although no major faults have been 'reported' in the area, I showed him this thread along with our latency monitoring data, and he could clearly see there’s an issue.

He then called one of the senior infrastructure engineers on loudspeaker—who was also very helpful. They confirmed there’s no planned maintenance during the affected times, but suggested the issue may be due to a bandwidth bottleneck. Apparently, funding has already been allocated for bandwidth upgrades in the Witham area, which our traffic routes through.

His report will be available for Gigaclear to see by the end of the day. He said to keep pushing at them to get it sorted and it should speed up the process. Also passed comment that the upgrades happen as more and more houses get connected onto their network.

Hope this helps.

In reply to a post by Bryer:

Yeah the problem seems to be in the North Essex area, seeing huge issue in the Kelvedon/Feering nodes at the moment from both ends of the village. Our backbone heads up to Coggeshall, where there are also contention issues at the moment.

It seems to be spreading. I'm in Northamptonshire and this was yesterday.

My Broadband Ping

I've noticed that weird ramp effect started on Wednesday too, coincidentally when I updated my router's firmware and attempted to enable IPv6. I've since backed out the latter as it's not enabled on my link.

ETA: That packet loss between 12 and 2pm occurred with no one at home. So the local network would have been all but 'silent'...

Paul

Edited by KryptonKid (Fri 09-May-25 16:28:37)

While on the phone with Gigaclear, the engineer who inspected the fibre gave me an update.

He mentioned that a meeting has been scheduled for Monday to discuss the upgrade. Although he couldn’t confirm a timeframe for any follow-up work, he said he’ll call me if he hears anything further from that meeting — so fingers crossed for some progress!

I also shared this thread with Gigaclear support during the call, and they’ve escalated it directly to their manager. Hopefully, this helps highlight the issue and moves things along.

And if anyone from Gigaclear management happens to see this — your customer service has been excellent, so thank you!

Did they replace your CPE?

Paul

In reply to a post by KryptonKid:

It seems to be spreading. I'm in Northamptonshire and this was yesterday.

Same here, we are in East Northamptonshire.

Hopefully this can be escalated and resolved by GC soon.