My Broadband Ping

Snap shot.

Edited by lockyatlrg (Wed 14-Oct-15 17:08:06)

I am not saying that it could not be Zen, but not far from here we have a brand new estate my friends live on, so new, houses are still being built. It is about 1km to the exchange and brand new lines have been laid to service the estate. There are numerous people complaining locally about the terrible line conditions on the estate, after months of denying it, it appears OR have changed their mind and now admit there is a fault, on a duct access point that had got accidently buried by the developers, has now collapsed and damaged a cable.

So new estates are certainly not immune to problems.

Well it's about 4 years old as I say not noticed anything odd on stats that get collected and during the event.

I'm almost sure that the reason for you routing via Manchester will be something to do with BT Wholesale!

Even if your one is brand new to the cab, the issues you describe could be intermittent...a break in a cable somewhere maybe, damage causing by water ingress, or potentially a fault with cabinet/DSLAM equipment!

Have you asked your neighbours if they have had any issues, and also have you checked your equipment!

I'm a Zen LLU customer.

You know what I'm not going to bother with it, my line will end soon as ive got this to use..

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/4745799356

In reply to a post by mlmclaren:

I'm almost sure that the reason for you routing via Manchester will be something to do with BT Wholesale!

Zen terminate BT Wholesale traffic in London and Manchester. They also terminate LLU traffic in London and Manchester.

I live around 45 miles north of London. When I was on BT Wholesale, Zen terminated my traffic in Manchester, meaning latency to London had an extra 7-8ms for the trip to and from Manchester. When I was moved to LLU, Zen terminated the traffic in Manchester but more recently they switched to terminating traffic from my line (and presumably all other LLU lines on the same exchange) in London.


Unless it's changed, Zen's routes to the west (Ireland and North America) are lower latency from Manchester than London. This means that my latency to some US destinations increased slightly when my line was moved to termination in London.

London termination will always result in lower latency to London based servers, but it isn't always a good thing. Whilst low latency is nice, it is doubtful whether 7-8ms extra latency makes that much real world difference, especially if it does not add additional jitter.

In reply to a post by lockyatlrg:

I'm a Zen LLU customer.

Oh OK like me then,

I'm sorry then, I'm stumped at that one, I'm sure theres a reasonable reason for your traffic routing via Manchester instead of London though

In reply to a post by lockyatlrg:

You know what I'm not going to bother with it, my line will end soon as ive got this to use..

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/4745799356

Is that your connection or you just pulled the test result from elsewhere?

In reply to a post by David_W:

In reply to a post by mlmclaren:

I'm almost sure that the reason for you routing via Manchester will be something to do with BT Wholesale!

Zen terminate BT Wholesale traffic in London and Manchester. They also terminate LLU traffic in London and Manchester.

I live around 45 miles north of London. When I was on BT Wholesale, Zen terminated my traffic in Manchester, meaning latency to London had an extra 7-8ms for the trip to and from Manchester. When I was moved to LLU, Zen terminated the traffic in Manchester but more recently they switched to terminating traffic from my line (and presumably all other LLU lines on the same exchange) in London.


Unless it's changed, Zen's routes to the west (Ireland and North America) are lower latency from Manchester than London. This means that my latency to some US destinations increased slightly when my line was moved to termination in London.

London termination will always result in lower latency to London based servers, but it isn't always a good thing. Whilst low latency is nice, it is doubtful whether 7-8ms extra latency makes that much real world difference, especially if it does not add additional jitter.

I would think connections routed via BT Wholesale would determine the quickest route and depending on utilisation levels on certain routes to this could well be the reason for heading north instead of south.

The extra 7-8ms shouldn't have much impact no or at least I wouldn't think so.

I found when I lived in Birmingham with my Virgin Media Cable, traffic for Grand Theft Auto Online on the Xbox 360 used to connect to servers west of the country and worked a HELL of a lot better even though they travelled across the atlantic, however now I live in the South East and traffic is routed to Europe via London the connections are very flakey/Busy!

So in some cases, being routed via Manchester is probably better in some cases, maybe avoiding major/busy backhauls for data centres in and around London.