In reply to a post by ukwiz:

When my latency increased from 7 to 20 earlier this month I raised a ticket with Zen. Here is their response:

Zen servers work to ensure that latency is spread as evenly as possible between our customers. Rather than have one customer with high latency and 10 with tiny latency we want our servers to ensure that no individual has significantly more or less latency than anyone on the server as nobodie's traffic should be prioritized.

Multiple online sources state latencies of less than 50Ms as good. A latency of 20Ms is universally considered excellent or even unrealistic to aim for. Your latency could have increased due to a number of factors, but the most likely one is that usage in your area increased so to ensure everybody had a good browsing experience everyone's latency increased slightly to allow for the greater throughput needs without impacting service.

If internet traffic increases in your area further your latency is likely to increase along side that in order to ensure everyone has the best browsing experience. We cannot save particularly good latencies for individual customers as it would give all our other users a worse experience. If your latency regularly reaches 200-500Ms unloaded then there may be a loading issue on your line that could need investigation and addressing, but with it still being at above excellent rates we are unable to take further action.

To sum up the e-mail you received from Zen support, what a load of drivel. Thankfully their NOC teams are much better than their customer facing teams, which seem to have gone downhill in recent years.

From my understanding, the latency difference is down to Zen’s geographically diverse network. This is a good thing if reliability is your main concern, not so good if you’re a stock trader 😊.

In reply to a post by devonkev:

From my understanding, the latency difference is down to Zen’s geographically diverse network. This is a good thing if reliability is your main concern, not so good if you’re a stock trader 😊.

From a business continuity perspective, the diverse routing to another gateway is probably quite a good strategy.

However from 'normal' operational perspective, probably not such a brilliant plan to effectively round-robin connections onto a getaway that has a 3x RTT penalty to it - especially when 1 X RTT is the alternative.

Clearly its annoying folks and driving the ones away that are clued up to what's going on, and that its not 'normal'.

Particularly when they actively advertise as being amazing for gaming, yet it's pot luck as to which gateway you end up on which can have different affects on your latency.

https://www.zen.co.uk/broadband/gaming-broadband

To help with resilience that would mean if one route goes down there must be enough spare capacity for everyone to join the other, and I simply don't think Zen run their network with anything spare! I assume this because every few weeks or so it seems they have to drop a load of PPP sessions (the 1:30am drops) to get people to reconnect on to other routes, probably because a lot of their customers play gateway roulette until they have better latency/speeds, so over a few weeks things become unbalanced and they have to shuffle everyone around again. Also single thread speed tests here often struggle suggesting congestion.

Since being on Zen via IDNet, I've not gone more than 30 days or so of uptime, sometimes a lot less, and this is FTTP that with previous ISP drops rarely happened, and we were told when they would happen, as you might expect of a decent ISP. Zen appear to give no warnings or even acknowledge these drops happen.

Edited by E300 (Mon 27-Sep-21 14:39:27)

Cerberus were incredibly stable with their PPP connections. In the two years I was with them had possible 2 or maybe 3 drop/reconnects.

In contrast I’ve been with TTB since mid June and the connection bounced twice in July and once in August for 5 to 10 minutes at the typical times of between 00:30 and 01:30 mid-week.

By no means not really something to be crying in my beer over…but nevertheless not the pinnacle of connection stability (nor the lowest latency if I’m being really harsh) that I had with Cerberus.

You often get what you pay for 😎

I'll post a reply here in the thread. I'm in Southwest Scotland. On FTTC. I used to go through the Manchester gateway with ping times of about 25ms average. About ..ohhh.. 2 years ago they apparently switched me to the London gateway, I've been there ever since. Here is a traceroute to www.bbc.co.uk that I just did. Go figure it all out

Tracing route to uk.www.bbc.co.uk.pri.bbc.co.uk [212.58.233.252]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms fritz.box [192.168.188.1]
2 16 ms 73 ms 31 ms vt1.cor2.lond1.ptn.zen.net.uk [51.148.72.22]
3 17 ms 16 ms 17 ms lag-9.p2.thn-lon.zen.net.uk [51.148.73.174]
4 17 ms 20 ms 18 ms lag-2.br1.thn-lon.zen.net.uk [51.148.73.167]
5 18 ms 38 ms 17 ms 82.71.254.134
6 17 ms 39 ms 16 ms 132.185.248.51
7 17 ms 16 ms 16 ms ae11.cr02.thdow.bbc.co.uk [132.185.254.166]
8 * * * Request timed out.
9 16 ms 16 ms 16 ms ae2.er01.lbh.bbc.co.uk [132.185.249.7]
10 * * * Request timed out.
11 17 ms 18 ms 17 ms 212.58.234.3
12 16 ms 16 ms 17 ms 212.58.233.252

Trace complete.

Edited by TygerTyger2010 (Tue 28-Sep-21 08:44:33)

An interesting destination URL?
Tracing route to uk.www.bbc.co.uk.pri.bbc.co.uk

Missed a bit, trace was www.bbc.co.uk

Did another trace just now:

C:\>tracert www.bbc.co.uk

Tracing route to uk.www.bbc.co.uk.pri.bbc.co.uk [212.58.237.252]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms fritz.box [192.168.188.1]
2 16 ms 17 ms 16 ms vt1.cor2.lond1.ptn.zen.net.uk [51.148.72.22]
3 21 ms 16 ms 17 ms lag-9.p1.thn-lon.zen.net.uk [51.148.73.160]
4 16 ms 17 ms 17 ms lag-1.br1.thn-lon.zen.net.uk [51.148.73.153]
5 17 ms 16 ms 16 ms 82.71.254.134
6 29 ms 17 ms 16 ms 132.185.248.51
7 16 ms 17 ms 16 ms ae11.cr02.thdow.bbc.co.uk [132.185.254.166]
8 17 ms 16 ms 16 ms ae0.cr01.thdow.bbc.co.uk [132.185.254.1]
9 17 ms 20 ms 16 ms ae0.er01.telhc.bbc.co.uk [132.185.254.109]
10 17 ms 18 ms 17 ms 132.185.255.148
11 17 ms 16 ms 17 ms 212.58.238.5
12 30 ms 16 ms 16 ms 212.58.237.252

Trace complete.

But!

That still says "Tracing route to uk.www.bbc.co.uk.pri.bbc.co.uk".

Interestingly this seems to happen if you enter www.bbc.co.uk instead of bbc.co.uk as the traceroute destination.

Text

1 23 45 67 89 1011 1213 1415 1617 1819 2021 2223 2425 2627 2829 30

>tracert bbc.co.uk  Tracing route to bbc.co.uk [151.101.64.81] over a maximum of 30 hops:    1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  192.168.1.1  2     6 ms     6 ms     6 ms  thn-lns07-l6.cerberus.net.uk [46.37.48.1]   3     6 ms     6 ms     6 ms  hex-gw06-te030-43.cerberus.net.uk [46.37.33.43]  4     6 ms     6 ms     6 ms  ip81-59.fastly-gw1.lonap.net [5.57.81.59]   5     6 ms     6 ms     6 ms  151.101.64.81  Trace complete.  ---  >tracert www.bbc.co.uk  Tracing route to uk.www.bbc.co.uk.pri.bbc.co.uk [212.58.237.253]over a maximum of 30 hops:    1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  192.168.1.1   2     6 ms     6 ms     5 ms  thn-lns07-l6.cerberus.net.uk [46.37.48.1]  3     6 ms     7 ms     9 ms  bbc-linx.pr01.rbsov.bbc.co.uk [195.66.236.103]   4     7 ms     6 ms     6 ms  132.185.249.60  5     6 ms     6 ms     5 ms  ae0.er02.telhc.bbc.co.uk [132.185.254.105]   6    14 ms     9 ms     6 ms  132.185.255.148  7    19 ms    14 ms     6 ms  212.58.238.5   8     7 ms     6 ms     6 ms  212.58.237.253  Trace complete.