Manchester 'Breakout' instead of London?

Hello!

I currently have Virgin Media and live in Manchester. When I ping any sites hosted in Manchester my latency seems to be unexpectedly high. On further investigation it seems the 'breakout' for my connection is in London, so it appears to go across the country and back even for local connectivity which is frustrating.

Is there any way to get Virgin Media to 'break out' my connection in Manchester? If so, who do I need to contact and what do I need to say to get them to change my connectivity?

I think all Virgin Media connections route through London. My Virgin connection in the Edinburgh area certainly goes through London for almost everything.

The only exception is speedtest.net servers. The closest server to me was Edinburgh and any tests to this server would route directly to Edinburgh, with a 7ms ping as opposed to the minimum 20ms when routing via London.

Pretty much all UK ISP's have you connect in London.
Zen are 1 of the only providers that don't connect all customers through London as they also have a Manchester gateway.
Ideally those near or Northof Manchester connect to the Manchester gateway but it doesn't always work as it should.

A few of the new Alt-Nets, local ISP's or some CityFibre providers may do things differently.

They have a breakout with Linx in Manchester, so technically it should be possible.

Maybe they just don't have that much peering in Manchester currently.

In reply to a post by devonkev:

Maybe they just don't have that much peering in Manchester currently.

Most likely, as VM has around 5 million customers, many on 100 Mbps or faster, some on Gig1, so they will need a lot of capacity. Probably easiest to manage it in one city, given the size of the UK it shouldn't make much difference.

Which sites are you testing, and how sure are you that they are hosted locally on networks that peer locally? LINX Manchester is *tiny* compared to LON1.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

robably easiest to manage it in one city, given the size of the UK it shouldn't make much difference.

Right spot the little Englander. Let's say you are in Aberdeen and want to connect to work which is also in Aberdeen, but your Virgin Media connection is going via London. That is significant additional unneeded latency to the point where one would be seriously annoyed.

The physical distances involved would only add ~6ms to the total round trip time, which is nothing. If peering is important to you then it's a question to ask ISPs before signing up, and then to avoid ones that can't answer the question, which would rule out a lot of the options.

In reply to a post by jabuzzard:

Right spot the little Englander. Let's say you are in Aberdeen and want to connect to work which is also in Aberdeen, but your Virgin Media connection is going via London. That is significant additional unneeded latency to the point where one would be seriously annoyed.

,
Ouch, no need to be so barbed. If you're in Aberdeen or Inverness I fully understand, the OP was talking about Manchester. Even if you are in Aberdeen there are more latency issues to be had from misconfigured hardware (e.g. Virgin Media most of the time) or network encapsulation overheads. Or from domestic WiFi and unoptimised client devices.

Also in comparison with other countries (which are geographically much bigger) there are plenty of US ISPs where people in the middle of the country only exit to the public internet at one of the coasts. 1500 miles or more.

Edited by jchamier (Wed 11-May-22 18:16:07)

In reply to a post by jabuzzard:

Right spot the little Englander. Let's say you are in Aberdeen and want to connect to work which is also in Aberdeen, but your Virgin Media connection is going via London. That is significant additional unneeded latency to the point where one would be seriously annoyed.

So you're expecting each AS to peer with every other AS in Aberdeen to avoid sub-20ms round trips, and every wholesaler to break out their transport network to the AS that are their ISP customers everywhere?

I'm going to speculate you don't work for an ISP so recommend you reach out to one and ask them why they don't have transit and peering in Aberdeen to avoid the 'significant unneeded latency', 12-16 ms on good networks, the round trip to London incurs. The amount of latency sensitive traffic that is degraded by that 'significant additional unneeded latency' is tiny and doesn't come close to justifying the costs involved.

In reply to a post by boxrick:

Hello!

I currently have Virgin Media and live in Manchester. When I ping any sites hosted in Manchester my latency seems to be unexpectedly high. On further investigation it seems the 'breakout' for my connection is in London, so it appears to go across the country and back even for local connectivity which is frustrating.

Is there any way to get Virgin Media to 'break out' my connection in Manchester? If so, who do I need to contact and what do I need to say to get them to change my connectivity?

They aren't going to reengineer their network to take a few milliseconds off your or any other residential customer's latency.

The latency is based around where they connect to the networks they need to connect to to get to your destination. Your connection 'breaks out' in Manchester, but VM's best route, in terms of the routing protocol which doesn't care at all about latency, to your destination is via London.

They can't manually change this for a small subset of customers as it would quickly create a mess.

It actually impacting on your usage the extra latency?

In my case, I am using remote play to my friend who lives perhaps 5 miles away. But because it is routed via London the latency is much higher.

I also have Hyperoptic at another property I own, when I requested it they simply changed it without much fuss. But when you are dealing with latency sensitive things those 15-20ms make a huge difference.

Also if you can get lower latency with a simple request, why wouldn't you if the provider can offer it?

Something is telling me that Virgin Media do not offer this then?

At my house with Virgin Media, sadly the only other choices are some low ADSL2+ speeds which are basically unusable these days ( like 10/0.8 speeds )

Edited by boxrick (Wed 11-May-22 22:47:45)

Virgin Media don't offer it, no. They are part of a company so large they don't connect to everyone directly and don't pay to connect to anyone.

Their route to your mate is via London. Their network is heavily traffic engineered to try and balance the 25,000-odd Gbit/s their network has to carry at times. There are exit points in Manchester but most traffic goes via London. Hyperoptic basically have a very few ways out of the network and a very few back. VM have many arranged in a pretty complex way.

Couldn't hurt to ask though. Maybe it's not actually supposed to be this way in this case but these connections are not built with latency in mind but cost and capacity.

Edited by XGS_Is_On (Thu 12-May-22 10:31:24)

Hyperoptic is a tiny ISP in comparison with Virgin Media. VM have nearly 6 million broadband customers, around the country. Hyperoptic mostly focused on blocks of flats, and so might have 0.5 million by now?

825K premises passed according to this recent article.

Don’t think they’d be at 500K connections, probs less than 300K.

VM/Liberty on the other hand “too posh to transit”. They are ahem…Tier 1 🤣

Edited by Pheasant (Thu 12-May-22 10:52:35)