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.

This hasn't happened for quite a long time, and when it has I've been able to quickly reconnect and get a Manchester gateway, until today. The connection appeared to drop at around 1am last night and no matter how many times I hit "reconnect" in the FritzBox interface I'm getting a LON gateway. Have they got rid of the MAN gateways? My ping is a lot worse than previously and I don't seem to be able to solve the issue the usual way.

I'm out of contract, and there are cheaper options out there, so if they have stopped using Manchester as a POP then I may as well go with a cheaper ISP that just has POPs in London and save a bit.

Edited by misstuned (Sun 11-Jun-23 13:30:05)

Did you make a note of the Manchester gateways? if so can you ping them?

Yes! The IP of the last Manchester gateway I was connected to is in my FritzBox event log (51.148.77.135) and it's pingable, 17ms away from me currently because of the Manchester-London-Manchester detour.

In reply to a post by misstuned:

Yes! The IP of the last Manchester gateway I was connected to is in my FritzBox event log (51.148.77.135) and it's pingable, 17ms away from me currently because of the Manchester-London-Manchester detour.

I would probably raise a ticket with Zen and have a moan as it does make a big difference.

I wonder if the disconnects are the fritz checking for firmware updates via zen's backdoor account ?

In reply to a post by dect:

In reply to a post by misstuned:

Yes! The IP of the last Manchester gateway I was connected to is in my FritzBox event log (51.148.77.135) and it's pingable, 17ms away from me currently because of the Manchester-London-Manchester detour.

I would probably raise a ticket with Zen and have a moan as it does make a big difference.

I'll do that - obviously they won't look at it until tomorrow (at the very earliest, they've become pretty slow) but I'm still unable to connect to anything but LON gateways. I seem to be stuck on the two gateways at 51.148.77.128 and 129 (both in IXN-LON) no matter how many reconnects I do. I'm pretty close to moving on from Zen because new full fibre options are now available locally from Openreach and CityFibre, so I'll be fairly short in patience with this issue. Moving from VDSL to FTTP will likely lower my ping more than moving my gateway back to Manchester.

Check your Zen control panel to see if it shows a completed order (like a GEA migration).
I'm sure I recall reading that the gateways available to you depends on what backhaul you are on.
If that is the case then a change of backhaul would explain why you can no longer access a particular gateway.

In reply to a post by misstuned:

In reply to a post by dect:

In reply to a post by misstuned:

Yes! The IP of the last Manchester gateway I was connected to is in my FritzBox event log (51.148.77.135) and it's pingable, 17ms away from me currently because of the Manchester-London-Manchester detour.

I would probably raise a ticket with Zen and have a moan as it does make a big difference.

I'll do that - obviously they won't look at it until tomorrow (at the very earliest, they've become pretty slow) but I'm still unable to connect to anything but LON gateways. I seem to be stuck on the two gateways at 51.148.77.128 and 129 (both in IXN-LON) no matter how many reconnects I do. I'm pretty close to moving on from Zen because new full fibre options are now available locally from Openreach and CityFibre, so I'll be fairly short in patience with this issue. Moving from VDSL to FTTP will likely lower my ping more than moving my gateway back to Manchester.

interesting, I'm from the north-west not Manchester but within a 50-60mile radius, and my historic experience was BT wholesale backhaul all traffic was peered from Manchester POP Even transatlantic traffic ,no detour via London, Then i was migrated on to TALK TALK wholesale or tiscali tails , and was routed to London,, Manchester not an option, but pings were the same or 1ms lower On the like's of TBB ping box and consistent too, then later i was migrated onto zen's own or masked backhaul And the mcr gateways were higher in latency over all , the inferion gateway's in london (IXN-LON) has been offering me the lowest latency out of the rest of them Sometimes beating the mcr direct on bt wholsale

In reply to a post by j0hn83:

Check your Zen control panel to see if it shows a completed order (like a GEA migration).
I'm sure I recall reading that the gateways available to you depends on what backhaul you are on.
If that is the case then a change of backhaul would explain why you can no longer access a particular gateway.

That's a good shout, but I've just checked my Zen panel and the only order is the original one for "Unlimited Fibre 1" broadband, no migrations or other orders. I don't really know what's going on, so I've left a ticket in Zen's black hole. I'm going on holiday tomorrow, so I might even have a reply when I get home!

I had the problem of my Fritz box frequently disconnecting (and therefore changing gateway although I've recently within the last ~month been correctly stuck on Manchester when I previously kept bouncing to London) but I found out that this was at the same time as my fritz box updated. I changed the update settings in System -> Update -> Auto Update and now no more issues.