Continually getting moved to the London gateway

I'm a relatively happy user of Zen 40/10 FTTC, with one fairly minor problem and I'm wondering if anyone can relate and/or can help.

Every so often (1-2 days or so, normally in the dead of night) the connection will briefly drop - I don't notice the connection drop and reconnect, other than that after it reconnects my ping is a bit higher, because I've been moved away from Manchester (WH-MAN) and onto one of their London gateways (either THN-LON or IXN-LON). I live in the Manchester area and my ping to the WH-MAN gateway is ~5ms while it's ~12-16ms when I'm on either of the LON ones. It's particularly noticeable when connected to my work's remote desktop, presumably because the packets are going down to London and back rather than staying in Manchester.

Hitting "reconnect" in the Fritzbox interface a few times tends to get me back to Manchester, but before I potentially waste the time of their tech support, is there any way on Zen's side of making sure my packets don't do the London detour? The disconnects in the night don't bother me, but I'd rather always be connected via Manchester.

Have a look at this thread it may give you some information.
Zen Gateway

Thanks! Not sure how I missed that - it looks like they're already working on this problem. I can't post the traceroute because it's to my employer's network, but when I do a traceroute to my work's systems and I'm connected via WH-MAN the connection stays in Manchester and doesn't make the London trip. When I'm connected to either of the London gateways, it goes down to London and back up to Manchester, so it's an issue, albeit minor.

I'll swap you!

Overnight my connection dropped and I went from a London gateway to a Manchester gateway and my latency has doubled. My head exchange is Shaftesbury, Dorset so connecting to Manchester makes no sense.

Edit: Reconnect and I'm back to London.

Edited by jelv (Thu 19-May-22 12:56:24)

In reply to a post by jelv:

I'll swap you!

Overnight my connection dropped and I went from a London gateway to a Manchester gateway and my latency has doubled. My head exchange is Shaftesbury, Dorset so connecting to Manchester makes no sense.

Edit: Reconnect and I'm back to London.

There seem to be more London gateways than Manchester ones, so I often have to reconnect 3-4 times before I'm returned to Manchester, after doing the rounds of various London gateways! I tend to only bother to do it if I'm going to have a long remote desktop session on a workday, rather than if it's the evening and I'm going to be streaming TV or something (which is unaffected).

At least Zen has the option of a Manchester gateway, unlike most ISPs that route everyone via London regardless of where they are in the UK. I just wish it would connect to it every time, rather than this seemingly random allocation (and that people in the south would connect to London every time).

I had a similar problem. Spoke to tech support, and was told that a doubling of latency was not a fault.
They then recommended gateway hopping as a solution.

There are two gateways guaranteed to double my latency:
vt1.cor1.lond2.ptn.zen.net and
vt1.cor2.lond2.ptn.zen.net

Edited by ukwiz (Thu 19-May-22 14:46:06)

In reply to a post by misstuned:

Hitting "reconnect" in the Fritzbox interface a few times tends to get me back to Manchester, but before I potentially waste the time of their tech support, is there any way on Zen's side of making sure my packets don't do the London detour? The disconnects in the night don't bother me, but I'd rather always be connected via Manchester.

There is (or was, haven't looked, you can!) a setting in the FritzBox which disconnects you every night in the early morning. You can disable that.

OK. I looked. It might be Internet -> Account Information ->Internet Connection. Under Connection Settings toggle to show Change Connection Settings.

I have
Internet Connection
"Maintain permanently (recommended for flat rates)" and "Delay disconnection by provider to the period between" is not selected. And I don't disconnect every night.

In reply to a post by Woolwich:

In reply to a post by misstuned:

Hitting "reconnect" in the Fritzbox interface a few times tends to get me back to Manchester, but before I potentially waste the time of their tech support, is there any way on Zen's side of making sure my packets don't do the London detour? The disconnects in the night don't bother me, but I'd rather always be connected via Manchester.

There is (or was, haven't looked, you can!) a setting in the FritzBox which disconnects you every night in the early morning. You can disable that.

OK. I looked. It might be Internet -> Account Information ->Internet Connection. Under Connection Settings toggle to show Change Connection Settings.

I have
Internet Connection
"Maintain permanently (recommended for flat rates)" and "Delay disconnection by provider to the period between" is not selected. And I don't disconnect every night.

Thanks! I checked this out and the setting was already set to "maintain permanently" - it doesn't disconnect every night, it'll often stay connected for 2-3 days without a break, and then disconnect at a random point. Perhaps maintenance, or just a slightly glitchy line (I'm 500m or so from the cabinet).

It looks like the solution is either to hop around gateways before long RDP sessions to get onto a Manchester one, and/or to wait for Zen to come up with a better solution than "allocate a PoP to a user at random on connection". It'd be nice if they'd make this user-selectable in their control panel.

In reply to a post by misstuned:

I'm a relatively happy user of Zen 40/10 FTTC, with one fairly minor problem and I'm wondering if anyone can relate and/or can help.

Every so often (1-2 days or so, normally in the dead of night) the connection will briefly drop - I don't notice the connection drop and reconnect, other than that after it reconnects my ping is a bit higher, because I've been moved away from Manchester (WH-MAN) and onto one of their London gateways (either THN-LON or IXN-LON). I live in the Manchester area and my ping to the WH-MAN gateway is ~5ms while it's ~12-16ms when I'm on either of the LON ones. It's particularly noticeable when connected to my work's remote desktop, presumably because the packets are going down to London and back rather than staying in Manchester.

Hitting "reconnect" in the Fritzbox interface a few times tends to get me back to Manchester, but before I potentially waste the time of their tech support, is there any way on Zen's side of making sure my packets don't do the London detour? The disconnects in the night don't bother me, but I'd rather always be connected via Manchester.

Is it really every 2 days? I know it doesnt bother you but that has my curiosity as ZEN is a consideration of mine if cityfibre ever get a move on locally.

I can't say I've seen disconnects like that. Something is very wrong: Zen don't routinely disconnect people to balance gateways.