Lit Fibre pings

Could anyone on here with Lit Fibre please let me know what sort of ping speeds you're getting?

I was quite disappointed to go from getting 1-2 ms on my BT via OpenReach FTTP 500/72 service to 8-9 ms on my new Lit Fibre 1000.

I know it seems like that's not a big deal, but I can't help feeling that everything (web page loading, etc.) )just feels a bit less snappy now.

ping -c 4 bbc.co.uk
PING bbc.co.uk (151.101.0.81): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 151.101.0.81: icmp_seq=0 ttl=51 time=10.591 ms
64 bytes from 151.101.0.81: icmp_seq=1 ttl=51 time=8.029 ms
64 bytes from 151.101.0.81: icmp_seq=2 ttl=51 time=8.430 ms
64 bytes from 151.101.0.81: icmp_seq=3 ttl=51 time=9.366 ms

--- bbc.co.uk ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 8.029/9.104/10.591/0.986 ms

Do you live inside the core data center for BT?

There is no way that you are feeling a 6ms change in ping, either there is a different problem potentially relating to your DNS resolvers, or it's confirmation bias.

Edited by jpm (Mon 18-Mar-24 21:39:25)

Well firstly, it’s not a 2 ms change and secondly, if it’s a quadrupling of latency overall then would that not be perceptible?

Anyway, my original question still stands.

What is your geographic location? My ping to bbc.co.uk in Hertfordshire on Lit is 4ms.

In reply to a post by rickwookie2:

if it’s a quadrupling of latency overall then would that not be perceptible?

If it was 1 second quadrupled to 4 seconds then that analogy might makes sense.
2ms quadrupled to 8ms not so much.

If you think you are noticing a difference between 2ms and 8ms latency then it's confirmation bias. Or there's another factor with the connection making responsiveness noticeable.
It definitely isn't the minimum base latency though.

As for why Litfibre has 8ms vs 2ms, who knows. Try performing a tracert and see where the (very small) additional latency is coming from.

Blaming the increase in PING isn't Confirmation Bias; it's likely a simple case of incorrect Root Cause Analysis. Now, if the OP ignored other responses in favour of one(s) that agreed with their diagnosis of the problem, then that would be Confirmation Bias. Confirmation bias being "the tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values."

@rickwookie2, as others have said, the increase in latency is unlikely to be the cause of any sluggishness. From the looks of the PING formatting you're running some flavour of Linux, so for a relatively fair comparison I booted up one of my Linux VMs. Direct connection wise, there's no discernable difference in responsiveness between my Windows and Linux boxes with a PING mean of 3ms +/- 1ms. If I connect to a VPN terminating in a Manchester DC the PING jumps to a mean of 9ms +/- 1ms, and again there's no discernable difference. It only becomes noticeable when using a VPN that terminates in Switzerland. My PING increases to ~40ms, and bandwidth drops from 900Mbps to ~280Mbps. According to Firefox's Network Monitor, it's 1.5 sec to load bbc.co.uk natively vs 2.0 sec via Switzerland. But that small difference has taken a latency increase that's over 13 times as much and at a bandwidth that's less than 1/3 of usual.

I'd recommend looking elsewhere for the cause of any slow-down. Things like: Have your DNS servers changed? Does it improve if you use 1.1.1.1 or 9.9.9.9? Was your Wireless Access Point swapped when changing providers? Have you moved to a different room? Are you running wired, and does your switch need power-cycling? Could you have picked up a virus or other malware infection? Do you have other traffic, particularly uploads, running on the same connection? Have you updated NIC drivers recently? Installed or updated any other software?
This isn't even an exhaustive list, just a few things to consider if you re-evaluate the cause of you issues.

You wouldn't be able to notice a latency that small even if it has quadrupled.

Trippy is useful for checking these types of issues - https://github.com/fujiapple852/trippy

You can see where in the route the delays are and whether it is a consistent speed or varying

# Host Loss% Snt Recv Last Avg Best Wrst StDev Sts │
│1 **Hidden** 0.0% 19 19 0.6 0.6 0.4 0.7 0.1 🟢 │
│2 **Hidden** 0.0% 19 19 16.4 17.0 4.4 43.6 10.5 🟢 │
│3 10.240.10.17 0.0% 19 19 4.1 4.7 3.8 11.6 1.7 🟢 │
│4 10.240.10.187 0.0% 19 19 4.2 4.6 3.8 14.0 2.1 🟢 │
│5 195.66.227.114 0.0% 19 19 4.3 4.0 3.1 4.3 0.3 🟢 │
│6 151.101.64.81 0.0% 19 19 4.0 3.9 3.2 4.1 0.2 🟢 │
│

What is your location.

Latency will be lower if your location is optimal for infrastructure routing, e.g.l if on BT wholesale I have higher latency as it goes north first to Peterborough before going south again to London, whilst every other network I have been on seems to take a more direct route.

Also do lit fibre have multiple handover points around the country or just London might be a factor as well.