Latency seems to have increased? Packet Loss and spikes

Hi all.

I am currently with Zen and have been using their internet since May which has been good with low latency and Ping, but I have noticed the latency has doubled and fluctuates a lot with some heavy packet loss.

Here is an example taken sometime in June

12th June BQM

After it stayed like that till the 15th June and then returned to levels I was used to. Before returning I got a lot of packet loss as well.

15th June BQM

It has now doubled again and i am not sure if this is normal or if I should go back and ask them to investigate? This is my first time using an openreach connection

In reply to a post by HighwindX:

Hi all.

I am currently with Zen and have been using their internet since May which has been good with low latency and Ping, but I have noticed the latency has doubled and fluctuates a lot with some heavy packet loss.

Here is an example taken sometime in June

12th June BQM

After it stayed like that till the 15th June and then returned to levels I was used to. Before returning I got a lot of packet loss as well.

15th June BQM

It has now doubled again and i am not sure if this is normal or if I should go back and ask them to investigate? This is my first time using an openreach connection

Lots of reports both on this forum and elsewhere about Zen (and those ISPs buying their backhaul) suffering as Zen try and load-balance the throughput on their London and Manchester gateways if you don't mind researching a bit further.

Have you had a GEA migration I wonder? I know it won't be something you asked for, but please check if it has been done?

log into Zen, My Account, My Orders (bottom left), Order History - you will see something like below if you have been migrated:

Zen FTTP GEA Migration
zenxxxxx@zen Fulfilled on 21/03/2022 £0

Anyone else with similar issues, please check, and post if you have been migrated.

I checked my account, following your instructions and can't see any record of a migration.

What else should I do to check what's going on? I am also searching to see what other issues people are having based on what @GonePostal mentioned.

Is it possible I have been routed to Manchester? How can I check?

In reply to a post by HighwindX:

I checked my account, following your instructions and can't see any record of a migration.

What else should I do to check what's going on? I am also searching to see what other issues people are having based on what @GonePostal mentioned.

Is it possible I have been routed to Manchester? How can I check?

By performing a Tracert to any we address Run box type cmd and then type tracert and the web address you want to find out the route taken The 1st hop after your router will have man in its dns name if you are routed via Manchester data centre

In reply to a post by tommy45:

In reply to a post by HighwindX:

I checked my account, following your instructions and can't see any record of a migration.

What else should I do to check what's going on? I am also searching to see what other issues people are having based on what @GonePostal mentioned.

Is it possible I have been routed to Manchester? How can I check?

By performing a Tracert to any we address Run box type cmd and then type tracert and the web address you want to find out the route taken The 1st hop after your router will have man in its dns name if you are routed via Manchester data centre

Thank you.

Looks like I am being routed to Manchester:

Tracing route to dns.google [8.8.8.8]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms Main Router
2 78 ms 48 ms 75 ms lo0-0.bng3.wh-man.zen.net.uk [51.148.77.130]
3 25 ms 19 ms 19 ms lag-7.p2.wh-man.zen.net.uk [51.148.73.14]
4 19 ms 135 ms 19 ms lag-3.p1.thn-lon.zen.net.uk [51.148.73.136]
5 19 ms 19 ms 19 ms lag-1.br1.thn-lon.zen.net.uk [51.148.73.153]
6 20 ms 19 ms 19 ms 72.14.223.28
7 19 ms 19 ms 19 ms 209.85.249.187
8 19 ms 19 ms 19 ms 142.251.52.143
9 19 ms 18 ms 20 ms dns.google [8.8.8.8]

Trace complete.

I'll see about them changing it back.

Edited by HighwindX (Sat 25-Jun-22 09:38:15)

Thanks HighWindX, it could all be related though, but I am not sure. Please look at the "Slow Speeds after GEA migration" forum - I am disgusted to see that Zen only 'guarantee' 450Mbps form 900Mbps service (that's across the board to all FTTP packages actually). Something is going wrong there.

I am in Cheshire, and my tracers is below:

steve@Steves-Mac-mini ~ % traceroute 8.8.8.8
traceroute to 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 fritz.box (192.168.1.254) 0.796 ms 0.364 ms 0.230 ms
2 lo0-0.bng4.wh-man.zen.net.uk (51.148.77.131) 5.252 ms 5.456 ms 5.181 ms
3 lag-8.p2.wh-man.zen.net.uk (51.148.73.118) 12.983 ms 12.746 ms 12.767 ms
4 lag-3.p1.thn-lon.zen.net.uk (51.148.73.136) 11.647 ms 11.989 ms 11.205 ms
5 lag-1.br1.thn-lon.zen.net.uk (51.148.73.153) 11.872 ms
lag-2.br2.thn-lon.zen.net.uk (51.148.73.155) 11.839 ms
lag-1.br1.thn-lon.zen.net.uk (51.148.73.153) 12.413 ms
6 72.14.223.28 (72.14.223.28) 11.262 ms
72.14.217.190 (72.14.217.190) 11.407 ms 11.688 ms
7 * 74.125.242.97 (74.125.242.97) 13.282 ms
74.125.242.65 (74.125.242.65) 12.918 ms
8 209.85.241.93 (209.85.241.93) 11.702 ms
172.253.66.89 (172.253.66.89) 13.274 ms
216.239.63.219 (216.239.63.219) 13.389 ms
9 dns.google (8.8.8.8) 12.921 ms 11.138 ms 11.180 ms
steve@Steves-Mac-mini ~ %

BUT I am NOT using the Zen GEA migration, I am back on BTW
I note that I am going via lo0-0.bng4.wh-man.zen.net.uk (51.148.77.131)
not 78 ms 48 ms 75 ms lo0-0.bng3.wh-man.zen.net.uk [51.148.77.130] you are going through....
No idea if that matters

Edited by SteveBushell999 (Sat 25-Jun-22 09:53:50)

It's not something they allow customers to change. I and others have reported it before on this forum and tried complaining to zen.

All zen customers every time they establish a connection end up with the possibility of being put on either of the two gateways. Every time your connection drops you may end up seeing a gateway switch and the disparity between the two gateways seems quite large. It's meant to be determined by which responds first but i'm not convinced. A member of zen did state they were going to improve it but i'm not sure if that has been carried out or not yet.

You could try dropping your session a few times to see if it flicks you to the other one.

In reply to a post by SteveBushell999:

I am disgusted to see that Zen only 'guarantee' 450Mbps form 900Mbps service (that's across the board to all FTTP packages actually). Something is going wrong there.

Disgusted? Really?

Openreach guarantee Zen 110Mb/s.
How can Zen guarantee you more than 450Mb/s? It's a good guarantee for what your pay.

It's a contended, budget, home broadband service. If you want better than a 450Mb/s guarantee then it's going to cost much more than Zen charge.

BT offer a to little higher guarantee in some areas, the same as Zen in other areas.

In reply to a post by j0hn83:

In reply to a post by SteveBushell999:

I am disgusted to see that Zen only 'guarantee' 450Mbps form 900Mbps service (that's across the board to all FTTP packages actually). Something is going wrong there.

Disgusted? Really?

Openreach guarantee Zen 110Mb/s.
How can Zen guarantee you more than 450Mb/s? It's a good guarantee for what your pay.

It's a contended, budget, home broadband service. If you want better than a 450Mb/s guarantee then it's going to cost much more than Zen charge.

BT offer a to little higher guarantee in some areas, the same as Zen in other areas.

TalkTalk and BT, who are cheaper than Zen, offer 700 Mbps minimum on their 900 Mbps service.

In reply to a post by S2KIP:

In reply to a post by j0hn83:

In reply to a post by SteveBushell999:

I am disgusted to see that Zen only 'guarantee' 450Mbps form 900Mbps service (that's across the board to all FTTP packages actually). Something is going wrong there.

Disgusted? Really?

Openreach guarantee Zen 110Mb/s.
How can Zen guarantee you more than 450Mb/s? It's a good guarantee for what your pay.

It's a contended, budget, home broadband service. If you want better than a 450Mb/s guarantee then it's going to cost much more than Zen charge.

BT offer a to little higher guarantee in some areas, the same as Zen in other areas.

TalkTalk and BT, who are cheaper than Zen, offer 700 Mbps minimum on their 900 Mbps service.

As I said in my reply BT only guarantee 700Mb in some areas, it's 450Mb everywhere else.

They may be cheaper but they have the economies of scale. Their supplier guarantees them 110Mb/s.

Their guarantee is worthless. If you get 200Mb/s and you complain, they may try increase your speeds, but ultimately all they can do is let you out your contract.
They have no way to enforce that guarantee.

Edited by j0hn83 (Sat 25-Jun-22 13:14:32)

Wrong ! -BT Guarantees below:
Product. Download Stay Fast Guarantee Upload Stay Fast Guarantee.
Full Fibre 100 100Mpbs. 10Mbps
Full Fibre 300 150Mbps 10Mbps
Full Fibre 500 250Mpbs 10Mbps
Full Fibre 900. 700Mbps 10Mbps

SOMEWHAT more than the 50% Zen offer.

And you are talking rubbish that one shouldn't expect more than 450Mbps. without paying the hundreds of pounds a month you recommend for TalkTalk business

In reply to a post by zebb_edi:

It's not something they allow customers to change. I and others have reported it before on this forum and tried complaining to zen.

All zen customers every time they establish a connection end up with the possibility of being put on either of the two gateways. Every time your connection drops you may end up seeing a gateway switch and the disparity between the two gateways seems quite large. It's meant to be determined by which responds first but i'm not convinced. A member of zen did state they were going to improve it but i'm not sure if that has been carried out or not yet.

You could try dropping your session a few times to see if it flicks you to the other one.

In my experience, If you are routed via Manchester , then that sticks and vice versa would presumably apply , I when was on TT backhaul got routed via London data centre this made no real difference Zen appears to have made changes to their GEA routing as the 1st time i was migrated on to it from BT WMBC backhaul i got routed via London, doubling base latency whereas this time around i get routed via Manchester data centre, and latency is More or less within what i regard as normal ranges a couple of ms higher than when on the TT backhaul

I am referring to the whole speed spectrum - Zen is 50% across the board, BT is 100% - 78%.

In addition, there is no mention on BT's website of variations by area, I am not sure where guy saw that, please provide the link that lists areas - FTTP only.BT's claims

Mine is:

Your Stay Fast Guarantee 425Mb

In reply to a post by SteveBushell999:

I am referring to the whole speed spectrum - Zen is 50% across the board, BT is 100% - 78%.

BT is only 50% on Full Fibre 300 and Full Fibre 500. It surprises me that the Upload Stay Fast Guarantee is only 10 Mbps across the board.

In reply to a post by SteveBushell999:

I am referring to the whole speed spectrum - Zen is 50% across the board, BT is 100% - 78%.

In addition, there is no mention on BT's website of variations by area, I am not sure where guy saw that, please provide the link that lists areas - FTTP only.BT's claims

Here's another page that says it's 450Mb

https://www.bt.com/help/broadband/full-fibre/what-is...

As I said in some areas it's 450Mb, in other areas it's 700Mb. Check postcodes for yourself, I've not got time to check every exchange.
There is no "list". As areas are upgraded the stay fast guarantee is increased from 450 to 700.

It was 450Mb/s when they launched the 900Mb package and was only increased to 700Mb/s a few months ago.

And you are talking rubbish that one shouldn't expect more than 450Mbps. without paying the hundreds of pounds a month you recommend for TalkTalk business

Where did I mention anything about Talktalk Business?

Home broadband is a shared, contended service.
They put hundreds of users on a single 10Gb GEA cablelink. Openreach guarantee the provider 110Mb/s, the provider offers the customer whatever they like.
BT has the scale to offer 450Mb/s (or 700Mb/s) as a guarantee. Zen clearly don't.
The guarantee is pretty worthless. They have no way to enforce it and ultimately they let customers out of their contracts whenever it can't be met.

For anything with a cast iron guarantee and low contention ratios then an expensive business service is required.

Talktalk has no static IP, no IPV6, offshore support. Crack on with them if you think their guarantee is that good.

Find another niche provider over Openreach like Zen with a faster guarantee for a similar price if it's so bad. I doubt you will be able to.

Edited by j0hn83 (Sun 26-Jun-22 18:55:08)

This is my latency roulette I'm having to play post GEA migration.

https://i.postimg.cc/kM1zZp3S/Clean-Shot-2022-06-30-...

The bigger issue seems to be the automated load balancing, its not a big deal if you manually get the one you want then it stays there for several months, but I am seeing more and more reports they keep doing forced rebalancing which is an indicator of running their gateways with not enough buffer capacity or a poor session steering system.

I get forced rebalancing weekly. The difference between London & Manchester connections for me is about 13ms.

On top of the we suddenly suffered a 20Mbps throughput drop overnight after all sorts of packet losses. DLM kicked in - but has now been reset - and because the throughput rate is >54Mbps Zen tell me Openreach will reject and request to fault check it. The suspicion is the local OR Cabinet (13 on Sandy Exchange) has an issue but getting OR to fix it is nigh on impossible. Line checks are OK and two different routers with all different cabling from the socket (NTE5c Mk4 and it’s Test Port) have given no improvement. Latency is stubbornly stuck at just over 20ms, up from 7ms.

Maybe performance will improve over a day or so? Zen are unable to help now.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

The bigger issue seems to be the automated load balancing, its not a big deal if you manually get the one you want then it stays there for several months, but I am seeing more and more reports they keep doing forced rebalancing which is an indicator of running their gateways with not enough buffer capacity or a poor session steering system.

All of the gateways I hit are in THN (London).

Wow, it seems I missed some discussion.

I have a bit of an update regarding the increased latency.

I fielded the problem to Zen and this was their reply:

Thank you for your email.

With regards to the latency increase from mid-June, I suspect the reason may be because of either a service outage or planned engineering works being carried out recently which has caused the connection to move gateways as a temporary solution to route the traffic.

Usually the connection would route through to the closest gateway, and in this case would be a London one. We have multiple gateways that work on a load-balancing system and it's possible that the gateway you were connected to had a fault and you were moved to a different one.

What I would like to recommend is to power down the router for about 15 minutes which will clear the sessions on the gateways. Power this back up and this usually would connect to another gateway that's closest to your area, as in another London Gateway.

As far as the latency goes, anything under 60-70ms is acceptable, and the lower the number the better.

If you're still experiencing browsing issues, you can change the DNS servers over to Google Primary of 8.8.8.8 and the secondary of 8.8.4.4, or use CloudFlare DNS of 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 and see how that behaves also.

I did exactly as they instructed and my latency dropped down to it's usual levels. Only problem is if I ever need to restart my internet for any reason, it has a chance of connecting to manchester again.

I haven't changed DNS to cloudflare yet but I will give that a go sometime this week. I assume this would be done in the asus router I am using.

BQM 1

BQM 2

I guess I will have to keep monitoring it to make sure I still stay in London. Rather annoying tbh.

Anything under 60-70 to the UK is not acceptable.

Zen sent me this response when I complained that my latency had doubled (8ms to 20ms):

------------
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.
-----------

In reply to a post by ukwiz:

Zen sent me this response when I complained that my latency had doubled (8ms to 20ms):

------------
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.
-----------

Seems they are getting congestion confused with latency, yes latency will rise on heavily congested networks but you don't want that either.

Latency is important, why else are they bringing in 5G where standalone mode will see single digit latency. FTTP is often sold as having better latency (no DSL modems in the way with error correction and interleaving) but Zen could remove that improvement at random and tell you "be happy".

Also Zen need to remember their latency adds to any other latency, for example Wi-Fi, which is why getting latency as low as possible where you can is important.

When you have a connection that is capable of <10ms latency over a brand new FTTP connection with just about any other ISP, then double that from Zen is not good, and they should be striving for better. Of course they don't as this is simply down to money and profit.

I had all these issues on IDNet which uses Zen backhaul, getting booted off every couple of weeks and finding latency had almost tripled. You can shuffle back to the better route only to get booted off again in a couple of weeks.

I'm now with AAISP, consistent 6.7ms latency, and an uptime so far of 66 days (that's how long I've been with them!). You'd be lucky to get that consistency and reliability with Zen or anyone that uses their backhaul.

Edited by E300 (Tue 05-Jul-22 14:11:55)

It seems to me that Zen are completely trying to ignore the issue and just reply with '20ms is excellent, what are you complaining about'. It's the sort of response I'd expect from Virgin Media, BT, or Talk Talk, not Zen who are supposed to be one of the better companies/

I've raised it with them and quoted their own Ts&Cs as they have made a change which has resulted in my service being substantially worse (5ms prior to migration to 12-24ms post migration). It's not the end of the world I admit, but by not giving notification of a change to your service and latency now being significantly worse (I'd say double is significant) you are well within your rights to give them 30 days' notice to rectify it.

Zen say:
14.4 If we make changes we will try to give you at least 30 days’ notice unless:
(a) the change is minor and does not affect you significantly

You ought to quote this to them and ensure that it is not confused with the OFCOM 30 days to rectify download speed.

Latency really should be a defined metric for being able to get out of contracts but sadly it is not. Even if it is arguably way more important than download/upload bandwidth.

Edited by S2KIP (Wed 06-Jul-22 15:55:22)

Zen have just informed me that they're migrating me back to BTW, which I'm very happy about.

Hope that works out for you. Let us know how you get on.

In reply to a post by jimbof:

Hope that works out for you. Let us know how you get on.

Will do, it might take up to 10 working days for it to go through, I'll update this thread once it's been completed.

The migration was supposed to happen on the 22nd, it didn't.

I'm now in a loop of 48h replies to emails with automated answers and agents on the phone who can't do anything.

After a lengthily phone call, most of the time I was on hold, Zen said they've cancelled my contract. I'm still waiting for email confirmation.

It took a while to get here though!

Whichever ISP you end up moving to, if you do, hopefully it'll be a much better experience!

A few years ago I suffered a slow 'single connection' download speed with Zen, after a fair time of trying to get them to fix the issue in the end the only way things got somewhere was when I finally left them a detailed and negative review on Trustpilot. At that point they were really interested and soon after decided to release me from the contract so I could migrate to another ISP without penalty (after the migration the problem went away). I've found Trustpilot can be a useful method for getting the attention of a business if it's not quite where it should be.

Edited by Ixel (Fri 29-Jul-22 09:46:49)

Aquiss activated on port 1 of my ONT, Zen are on port 2.

Pings to London based servers are 6ms with Aquiss.

Pings using Zen are 13+ms.

Will have to set up a TBB but jitter seems much improved.

I have zero idea what's happening with my Zen account, I've heard nothing since I last spoke to them on Thursday I think it was.

hmm I am on zen 900 and recently finding when I did a couple of reboots my gateway connects to manchester & my latency for both v4 and v6 end up around 16/17ms. Yet when I disable v6 and it reconnects to london latency returns to 6.4ms...

Never had an issue before so I wonder whats going on? for now I have stopped using ipv6 as I dont want to end up on manchester gateway all the time

Can you force connection to london to stop this from happening?, I had a brief chat with support but they dont seem bothered about it...

Any thoughts, thanks

When I connect to the Manchester (lo0-0.bng3.wh-man.zen.net.uk) gateway from Belfast on FTTP, my latency is all over the place, it was 100ms to 8.8.8.8 for a while, has now dropped to a minimum of 16ms with constant spikes up to 48ms.

Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=41ms TTL=117
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=21ms TTL=117
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=117
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=117
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=117
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=33ms TTL=117
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=19ms TTL=117
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=34ms TTL=117
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=20ms TTL=117
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=48ms TTL=117

Then I use the reconnect button in the fritz box web interface to try to change the POP used back to London (vt1.cor1.lond2.ptn.zen.net.uk) (I had to reconnect a few times to get latency this low - first reconnect was 18ms) which is solid:

Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=117
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=117
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=117
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=117
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=117
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=13ms TTL=117
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=117

Edited by cuddylier (Sun 07-Aug-22 21:46:49)

Thanks for confirming its not my kit as implied by zen support earlier....

My example


IPV6 enabled

     Server: Swish Fibre - London (id = 34948)
        ISP: Zen Internet Ltd
    Latency:    14.63 ms   (0.27 ms jitter)
   Download:   916.69 Mbps (data used: 989.7 MB )
     Upload:   110.97 Mbps (data used: 90.0 MB )
Packet Loss:     0.0%
 Result URL: https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/57590364-51f6-4240-876f-01fc9c154103

tracert www.google.co.uk

Tracing route to www.google.co.uk [2a00:1450:4009:81d::2003]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    16 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  OPNsense.localdomain ]
  2    14 ms    15 ms     9 ms  lo0-0.bng4.wh-man.zen.net.uk [2a02:8010::156]
  3    14 ms    15 ms    14 ms  lag-8.p2.wh-man.zen.net.uk [2a02:8010:0:900::1a]
  4    15 ms    14 ms    14 ms  ae-3.p1.thn-lon.zen.net.uk [2a02:8010:0:b00::3e]
  5    14 ms    14 ms    14 ms  2a00:1450:8136::1
  6     *       14 ms    14 ms  2001:4860:0:1::54ca
  7    14 ms    14 ms    14 ms  2001:4860:0:1::54c9
  8    14 ms    14 ms    13 ms  lhr25s31-in-x03.1e100.net [2a00:1450:4009:81d::2003]


IPV4 only via London

   Speedtest by Ookla

     Server: Swish Fibre - London (id = 34948)
        ISP: Zen Internet Ltd
    Latency:     7.20 ms   (0.12 ms jitter)
   Download:   912.86 Mbps (data used: 831.9 MB )
     Upload:   110.52 Mbps (data used: 53.9 MB )
Packet Loss:     0.0%
 

Tracing route to www.google.co.uk [142.250.187.195]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  OPNsense.localdomain
  2     6 ms     6 ms     6 ms  vt1.cor1.lond2.ptn.zen.net.uk [51.148.72.23]
  3     7 ms     7 ms     6 ms  lag-8.p2.ixn-lon.zen.net.uk [51.148.73.206]
  4     6 ms     7 ms     6 ms  lag-2.p2.thn-lon.zen.net.uk [51.148.73.138]
  5     7 ms     7 ms     6 ms  lag-2.br1.thn-lon.zen.net.uk [51.148.73.167]
  6     7 ms     7 ms     7 ms  72.14.223.28
  7     9 ms     8 ms     8 ms  209.85.249.149
  8     6 ms     6 ms     6 ms  142.251.54.35
  9     6 ms     6 ms     6 ms  lhr25s33-in-f3.1e100.net [142.250.187.195]

In reply to a post by choppersrock:

IPV6 enabled

I also have IPv6 enabled, I didn't do much testing before I got it enabled so I'm not sure if I might stick to the London gateways if I disabled it, I might do if this continues being a problem.

Usually my PPPoE doesn't reset often so I can stick to a gateway for 2 months or more but recently I've had quite a few PPPoE resets, I presume due to a fault at Openreach or Zen's end (Zen support couldn't find a cause) which has pushed me onto another gateway that has higher latency meaning I need to reconnect manually again until I get a good one. There must be a few different London gateways or at least something in between me and London because I can get either 21ms, 18ms or 12ms all while the 1st hop after the fritz.box in a traceroute/MTR showing as vt1.cor1.lond2.ptn.zen.net.uk.

Edited by cuddylier (Sun 07-Aug-22 22:06:24)

It's getting annoying hence why I disabled ipv6 for now. Due to a couple of reboots due to updates it keeps going to Manchester if I leave v6 on at the moment..

There are 2 London gateways that are "faulty" - vt1.cor1.lond2.ptn.zen.net and vt1.cor2.lond2.ptn.zen.net. Both give much higher latency (over double in my case).

Zen support will not do anything about higher latency. I complained that my latency increased from 8ms to 22ms and got this 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.

In reply to a post by choppersrock:

hmm I am on zen 900 and recently finding when I did a couple of reboots my gateway connects to manchester & my latency for both v4 and v6 end up around 16/17ms. Yet when I disable v6 and it reconnects to london latency returns to 6.4ms...

Never had an issue before so I wonder whats going on? for now I have stopped using ipv6 as I dont want to end up on manchester gateway all the time

Can you force connection to london to stop this from happening?, I had a brief chat with support but they dont seem bothered about it...

Any thoughts, thanks

Sadly Zen support have no idea about ipv6. There is a separate ipv6 department ONLY contactable via email. The normal support will not help at all, and will not raise a ticket.

Thanks. I think I will forward on the info to the ipv6 team anyway. Support at present don't seem interested..

In reply to a post by ukwiz:

There are 2 London gateways that are "faulty" - vt1.cor1.lond2.ptn.zen.net and vt1.cor2.lond2.ptn.zen.net. Both give much higher latency (over double in my case).

I don't think I've ever seen connections through those gateways (and the names don't look up publicly), but I'm connecting from FTTP900 so maybe they don't figure. The gateways I'm aware of are:
lo0-0.bng1.ixn-lon.zen.net.uk [51.148.77.128]
lo0-0.bng3.wh-man.zen.net.uk [51.148.77.130]
lo0-0.bng4.wh-man.zen.net.uk [51.148.77.131]
lo0-0.bng4.thn-lon.zen.net.uk [51.148.77.132]
lo0-0.bng5.thn-lon.zen.net.uk [51.148.77.133]

I note there looks to be one missing in my list, (129) but I've not seen it.

These London gateways all ping fine for me (4-5ms from Norwich), and the Manchester ones add the (expected?) 10ms penalty to my round trips to London test servers.

I was referring to fttc gateways. The ones with lond2 are bad ones, lond1 ones are good

More or less I got a response from support along the same lines as yourself. They aren't interested. No matter what I try it reverts to Manchester when ipv6 is on and increased latency so its v4 only for now. Its a shame as I havent encountered this happening until last week. I will be off once my fttp contract is up. We have a new altnet provider to try offering symmetrical speeds so would like to try it.

Nearly two weeks with no reply from Zen. Multiple emails have gone unanswered and if I manage to get hold of them on the phone they just say it's being dealt with. Complete circus!

I have setup my static ipv6 and managed to get back to London based gateway for now. I am hoping I can keep it like this for the remainder of my contract.

Sorry to hear they haven't been in touch.

They finally rang me on Friday, not long after I forwarded the email chain to the complaints team.

I originally called them on the 27th July and it was then they agreed to cancel my contract without penalty.

Took their time about it but at least it's done now and Aquiss have been excellent.

I found this thread from a Google as my Unifi network for the last week has been reporting high latency and packet loss, and things just not been working very well.

It seems I have the same issues as others, the routing doesn’t look great.


192.168.1.1 unifi.localdomain 4.5 ms
51.148.77.131 l00-0.bng4.wh-man.zen.net.uk 269 ms
51.148.73.118 lag-8.p2.wh-man.zen.net.uk 21 ms
51.148.73.136 lag-3.p1.thn-lon.zen.net.uk 20 ms
51.148.73.153 lag-1.brl.thn-lon.zen.net.uk 20 ms
72.14.223.28 21 ms 209.85.248.229 20 ms
142.251.54.47 20 ms
8.8.8.8 21 ms

I just reconnect till I get back to London as Manchester for me has a large increase in latency.

Thanks.

I may have to do that, Zen responded to my email asking why I am seeing high latency and packet loss, they didn’t mention or answer anything apart from asking if I was using the Fritzbox they sent me last year, which is sat there doing its thing with my Unifi network behind it.

In 18 months I think, somehow I have had more issues with Zen than 6 or more years with Sky.

Anyone left Zen and gone somewhere else recommended?

Yes, they agreed to cancel my contract and I'm now with Aquiss, much better and no gateway roulette.

Some years ago I had issues with slow single connection/stream throughput on the download side. After trying to get the problem resolved for a while I had to eventually leave a detailed but negative Trustpilot review which got their attention. In the end the outcome was that they released me from my contract and subsequently I moved to another ISP (AAISP if I recall correctly) which had no such problem and worked fine.

The issue i had with Zen regarding latency was a TalkTalk Wholesale backhal however I asked Zen to switch me back to BT Wholesale and its been pretty much fine however i had a slight issue with Zen FTTC recently, Between 9:30-10am on Saturday 27th aug, I was downloading a game from Steam and my zyxel router dropped its PPPoE session what resulted putting me on the Manchester gateway (wh-man) however it seems strange as im in north london and should be on THN or IXN gateways however dropping the PPPoE put me back in THN so not sure what happened there?

Anyone else got this also?

Edit:
My Broadband Ping - 27th Aug

Edited by francisuk25 (Tue 30-Aug-22 11:13:46)

In reply to a post by francisuk25:

im in north london and should be on THN or IXN gateways

I didn't think Zen selected a gateway based on your location, from what I am aware of Zen are always unwilling to even consider it as a problem.

Indeed. Zen, for some strange reason, don't appear to choose the nearest gateway based on the customer's location and they don't consider this a problem either despite the potential for an increased latency caused by an unnecessarily less direct route.

The "broadband for gamers and gaming" page on their website is somewhat meaningless if the customer's connection ends up on a gateway that takes a 'scenic' route.

In reference to www.zen.co.uk/broadband/gaming-broadband:

Low Latency
Everyone knows ping is king for smooth online gameplay. We’ve invested in our network to ensure consistently low latency – great when you need to get your shot off first.

*laughs*

Edited by Ixel (Tue 30-Aug-22 12:13:59)

In reference to www.zen.co.uk/broadband/gaming-broadband:

We’ve invested in our network to ensure consistently low latency

Its certainly not consistent if they allow Users to be flip flopped between north and south gateways each time a router reconnects to their service, this is unforgiveable of Zen.

I'm glad they don't select the nearest gateway. I'm in north west England and latency is double via Manchester vs London. So nearest gateway isn't always the best with Zen

I have asked Zen in the past if they can keep my gateway to THN only as i was experiencing issues with one of the IXN gateways however they said no as gateways are on a load balancing so really i can be on either London or Manchester.

I only tend to know if my gaming server is pinging between 12-14ms then i quickly traceroute to very that im on a Manchester gateway as on THN or IXN i can see 5-9ms max.

Edited by francisuk25 (Wed 31-Aug-22 02:03:01)