There's the potential for better gains depending on how different the route into Zen's core network is between their own backhaul and BTW. In my case, both connect to Zen in London, hence the miniscule difference.

I think you're Chester way, so I am marginally nearer Manchester here (near Northwich), currently I route via Manchester every time I look. It will be extremely interesting to see what happens.

As a matter of interest, how do you get the latency figure you quote? Is it just whatever Speedtest.net says (unloaded latency), just so I can quote the same figures and avoid confusion.

I completely get the financial advantages to Zen, I am just questioning whether this whole saga is just us going through the mill to boost Zen's profits!

Unless you end up with unforeseen issues 😬

And that is why the damage limitation seems to have kicked in......

In reply to a post by SteveBushell999:

As a matter of interest, how do you get the latency figure you quote? Is it just whatever Speedtest.net says (unloaded latency), just so I can quote the same figures and avoid confusion.

Ping BBC.co.uk or ping whatever your gateway is (first hop on a trace route).

It's so small its essentially in the margin of error really. Windows doesn't even give you decimal milliseconds, because it probably doesn't matter!

Like this:
PING bbc.co.uk (151.101.0.81): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 151.101.0.81: icmp_seq=0 ttl=58 time=11.167 ms
64 bytes from 151.101.0.81: icmp_seq=1 ttl=58 time=11.084 ms
64 bytes from 151.101.0.81: icmp_seq=2 ttl=58 time=11.152 ms
64 bytes from 151.101.0.81: icmp_seq=3 ttl=58 time=11.171 ms
64 bytes from 151.101.0.81: icmp_seq=4 ttl=58 time=11.141 ms
64 bytes from 151.101.0.81: icmp_seq=5 ttl=58 time=10.923 ms
64 bytes from 151.101.0.81: icmp_seq=6 ttl=58 time=11.122 ms
64 bytes from 151.101.0.81: icmp_seq=7 ttl=58 time=11.067 ms
64 bytes from 151.101.0.81: icmp_seq=8 ttl=58 time=11.064 ms
64 bytes from 151.101.0.81: icmp_seq=9 ttl=58 time=11.142 ms
64 bytes from 151.101.0.81: icmp_seq=10 ttl=58 time=11.230 ms
^C
--- bbc.co.uk ping statistics ---
11 packets transmitted, 11 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 10.923/11.115/11.230/0.077 ms
steve@Steves-Mac-mini ~ %

Or my Gateway:
steve@Steves-Mac-mini ~ % ping 51.148.77.131
PING 51.148.77.131 (51.148.77.131): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 51.148.77.131: icmp_seq=0 ttl=254 time=5.422 ms
64 bytes from 51.148.77.131: icmp_seq=1 ttl=254 time=6.579 ms
64 bytes from 51.148.77.131: icmp_seq=2 ttl=254 time=7.430 ms
64 bytes from 51.148.77.131: icmp_seq=3 ttl=254 time=6.156 ms
64 bytes from 51.148.77.131: icmp_seq=4 ttl=254 time=7.985 ms
64 bytes from 51.148.77.131: icmp_seq=5 ttl=254 time=6.362 ms
64 bytes from 51.148.77.131: icmp_seq=6 ttl=254 time=8.020 ms
64 bytes from 51.148.77.131: icmp_seq=7 ttl=254 time=5.357 ms
^C
--- 51.148.77.131 ping statistics ---
8 packets transmitted, 8 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 5.357/6.664/8.020/0.986 ms

Which is quite a difference! So, what should we agree on?

It's so small its essentially in the margin of error really. Windows doesn't even give you decimal milliseconds, because it probably doesn't matter!

Get a Mac (Or Linux)

Edited by SteveBushell999 (Tue 05-Jul-22 10:28:10)

What's the hostname of your gateway?

That's much lower latency than i ever get to my gateway... Perhaps you're going to Manchester rather than London.

The BBC ping is basically the same as mine, which I imagine is in London.

My Zen GEA line headline latency is about 1-2ms faster than the Openreach was, but the variance on the latency is much bigger - there is 1-2ms of variation over a given minute. That in itself is a bit of a warning sign really, and something that happens on busy circuits.
This is the changeover between from BT to Zen GEA:
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...

I've had it confirmed yesterday that for at least one Zen 900 user they're getting full speed 900mbps+ speedtests from both Zen and Swishfibre speedtest.net servers, whereas I'm now way down at ~500mbps for Zen and around 800mbps for Swishfibre. Let's hope Zen can get to the bottom of what this is.

Post deleted by SteveBushell999

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) 0.791 ms 0.368 ms 0.295 ms
2 lo0-0.bng4.wh-man.zen.net.uk (51.148.77.131) 4.967 ms 5.598 ms 5.018 ms
3 lag-8.p2.wh-man.zen.net.uk (51.148.73.118) 12.527 ms 12.511 ms 12.770 ms
4 lag-3.p1.thn-lon.zen.net.uk (51.148.73.136) 11.925 ms 12.145 ms 11.191 ms
5 lag-2.br2.thn-lon.zen.net.uk (51.148.73.155) 11.033 ms
lag-1.br1.thn-lon.zen.net.uk (51.148.73.153) 12.771 ms
lag-2.br2.thn-lon.zen.net.uk (51.148.73.155) 11.926 ms
6 72.14.223.28 (72.14.223.28) 12.258 ms
72.14.217.190 (72.14.217.190) 11.980 ms
72.14.223.28 (72.14.223.28) 11.568 ms
7 * * 108.170.246.161 (108.170.246.161) 12.090 ms
8 142.250.215.125 (142.250.215.125) 11.611 ms
dns.google (8.8.8.8) 11.623 ms
142.251.52.151 (142.251.52.151) 11.439 ms

So it's this one: lo0-0.bng4.wh-man.zen.net.uk (51.148.77.131) 4.967 ms 5.598 ms 5.018 ms, yes, Manchester.

Remembering that pure speed of light equates to about 186 miles per millisecond, you'd expect 2mS extra latency due to speed of light for London (Round trip time), plus any router delay. 5mS overall extra sounds reasonable, and you see that my latency goes to around 11mS for London

Edited by SteveBushell999 (Tue 05-Jul-22 11:00:06)

Packets Pings
Host Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev
1. untangle.chris.local 0.0% 49 2.9 1.5 0.3 11.6 1.8
2. lo0-0.bng2.ixn-lon.zen.net.uk 0.0% 49 13.8 17.1 11.9 37.4 5.8
3. lag-5.p2.ixn-lon.zen.net.uk 0.0% 49 12.8 13.2 11.4 17.6 1.2
4. lag-2.p2.thn-lon.zen.net.uk 0.0% 49 12.3 14.0 11.6 45.7 4.8
5. lag-2.br1.thn-lon.zen.net.uk 2.0% 49 12.0 15.1 11.9 62.1 8.2
6. ip81-59.fastly-gw1.lonap.net 0.0% 49 19.0 13.1 11.3 20.3 2.0
7. 151.101.192.81 0.0% 48 12.1 12.7 11.2 19.6 1.5


Zen clearly have some issues, it would be great to have some kind of official response on this.

As an aside, these latency timings are interesting, but off topic (Slow speed after GEA migration) - I agree that they are related to the Forum title, and relevant especially after the speed loss is addressed, should they perhaps be elsewhere?

Certainly for me, the latency was the very last of my problems while the fault was on my line, I'd have been delighted to keep a connection and get a web page to return data at the worst of times. I was not worried if I had even 200mS of latency, as the internet was to all intents and purposes unusable.

Looking back to the original post by FakeJake on this topic:

Hi all

I'm on the 900 FTTP package which as far as I'm aware was working fine until about a week ago when it looks like a GEA migration happened.

At this time, my neighbour's connection (on Zen 500 FTTP) just stopped working and they're having a hell of a time trying to get things back up and running. The openreach engineer that attended said he had a load of them to visit that day and he wouldn't be able to fix any of them as they are failed migrations.

I seem to have escaped the issues, or so I thought, as mine reconnected immediately, but I have since noticed that my speed has been absolutely shocking at some times and at other times is very low (tests lower than 10Mbps download at times, regularly lower than 100Mbps).
Tests are both over wifi and ethernet and I have rebooted the router (the Zen supplied fritzbox).
Occasionally I do get a reasonable test result (over 600Mbps). Upload test results are always over 100Mbps which is totally fine.

Considering that before this, test results were always consistently above 800mbps over ethernet (and around 500-600 over wifi), this is definitely a big degradation in service.

I've seen posts about this on various forums online (including this one) both complaining about speed and failed migrations following these migrations. I wonder why these seem to be so problematic and how I'm best tackling this, as I'd like my previous performance back!

Any advice? Has anyone got their original performance back after this migration?

Edit:
Further testing I've just done... fast.com and speedtest.net servers all seem to max out at about 200Mbps download at the moment. This includes trying some previously known good speedtest.net servers (vodafone etc). Zen's own speedtest.net server is particularly poor giving only about 60Mbps!
Any server I've tried on Speedtest.net seems to be like this, except Cloudlfare, which happily zips along as if nothing is wrong... https://www.speedtest.net/result/12960718313
What's going on?
Voda test: https://www.speedtest.net/result/12957202599
Zen test: https://www.speedtest.net/result/12957582043
Speedtest.net auto selection: https://www.speedtest.net/result/12960697398

Edited by SteveBushell999 (Tue 05-Jul-22 12:54:44)

Latency isn't a problem for me now or at any point during the time I had issues as far as I could tell.

Different issue?