Does the gateway choice matter

Hi all.
So I joined Zen over the weekend - and annoyingly I connect to London gateway and I live in Manchester (don't get me started on it being slower than my old provider on the same tier).
So I've tried to get to Manchester gateway but with no luck
Is there any advice to get to the correct one or does it not matter or not worth it.

tracert pingbox1.thinkbroadband.com

Tracing route to pingbox1.thinkbroadband.com [80.249.99.164]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 4 ms 16 ms 7 ms ZenAsusWiFi
2 30 ms 17 ms 17 ms lo0-0.bng5.thn-lon.zen.net.uk [51.148.77.133]
3 * * 18 ms lag-15.p1.thn-lon.zen.net.uk [51.148.73.98]
4 28 ms 19 ms 17 ms netconnex-gw.zen.net.uk [82.71.254.2]
5 19 ms 17 ms 14 ms ae11-11.edge-rt2.thdo.ncuk.net [80.249.97.21]
6 57 ms 12 ms 14 ms te1-51-36.core-rs3.thdo.ncuk.net [80.249.97.72]
7 13 ms 14 ms 12 ms po5-32.core-rs4.thdo.ncuk.net [80.249.97.90]
8 14 ms 17 ms 17 ms pingbox1.thinkbroadband.com [80.249.99.164]

Trace complete.

ping pingbox1.thinkbroadband.com

Pinging pingbox1.thinkbroadband.com [80.249.99.164] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 80.249.99.164: bytes=32 time=23ms TTL=57
Reply from 80.249.99.164: bytes=32 time=19ms TTL=57
Reply from 80.249.99.164: bytes=32 time=14ms TTL=57
Reply from 80.249.99.164: bytes=32 time=19ms TTL=57

Ping statistics for 80.249.99.164:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 14ms, Maximum = 23ms, Average = 18ms

Thanks in advance

Lots and lots of talk about Zen and its gateways on this forum. For example:

https://forums.thinkbroadband.com/zen/f/4761563-zens...

https://forums.thinkbroadband.com/zen/f/4763208-manc...

https://forums.thinkbroadband.com/zen/f/4755269-rout...

https://forums.thinkbroadband.com/zen/f/4712656-cont...

https://forums.thinkbroadband.com/zen/f/4715185-late...

Thanks mate for the links.

Also anyone know the answer to the 14 day cool off, as I signed on the 11th and went live on the 25th - does that mean my 14 days cancellation has expired?

Edited by repripper (Mon 28-Oct-24 14:00:54)

It doesn't really matter unless you have something going on that is especially sensitive to RTT differences of the order of a few ms.

I work from home on a Zen connection involving lots of remote management to other sites on different providers and it doesn't have any impact on my SSH sessions nor GUIs. The link to the workplace and to sites are via types of VPN using UDP also.

As our remote routers are on anything from multiple leased lines down to a Starlink connection this is the least of my concerns.

Even if I were minded to check or worry about the algorithm I would much rather be placed on a gateway that under the least load rather than by a function of geographic location.

Edited by prlzx (Mon 28-Oct-24 14:33:55)

I'm more concerned with online gaming really. The kids haven't used it yet, but was just wondering whether it would affect them.

Edited by repripper (Mon 28-Oct-24 14:05:27)

Sometimes people obsess over the traceroutes and then when they see a difference in the numbers they convince themselves they can feel an effect.

Others have a temporary issue and then go check the numbers and assume correlation is causation.

That's not to say some people don't also have genuine problems but multiple things can be true at the same time.
I just think packet loss and retransmits (or not in the case of UDP) are the bigger enemy with real-time apps compared with which PPP gateway an ISP dynamically assigns you.


Are the games involved especially latency sensitive? Will the kids be playing over Wi-Fi anyway? (which can be much more jittery than wired connections).
Are we talking about competitive first-person shooters and high refresh rates or something more casual?

Different games may have servers based in different locations anyway and some game servers and clients may have features to equalise or compensate for how game state updates (player position and weapons fire) are delivered across all players based on the longest RTT or a temporary lag spike (within reason of course).

If they are playing against anyone outside the UK for example it can't realistically affect you because that can add 100s of ms.

Edited by prlzx (Mon 28-Oct-24 14:46:49)

Oh boy.

There is gamers that will say they can notice latency differences in the single digits.

This is how we have ended up with all these super high refresh rate monitors, low latency modes, and such. This is now being translated into broadband latency.

Edited by Chrysalis (Mon 28-Oct-24 16:08:03)

Oh I am half-waiting for a pile on here even though I included caveats.
Given the number of Zen customers I think it highly unlikely people are noticing which gateway they are on.

It's also the reason why some gamers want the option of an intentional screen tearing mode in Wayland (display compositor) so they can see their monitor try to draw 2 (or more) different frames from the GPU during the same screen refresh and hope they see the (partially drawn) characters move slightly earlier.

Edited by prlzx (Mon 28-Oct-24 19:10:57)

In reply to a post by repripper:

(don't get me started on it being slower than my old provider on the same tier).

If this is fibre to the cabinet rather than FTTP, its almost always slower when you migrate between providers and should sort itself over the next couple of weeks or so, nothing to do with Zen.

As for gateways, I've never worried about it although I rarely play online games.

Edited by alexatkin (Mon 11-Nov-24 00:57:25)

In reply to a post by alexatkin:

its almost always slower when you migrate between providers and should sort itself over the next couple of weeks or so, nothing to do with Zen.

Thanks for the advice.