High latency on Virgin media link

[Esnw33430]

Hi All,

Anyone else seeing issues with high latency on traffic heading over to Manchester area today?

Been looking at connectivity issues and poor performance with a 3rd party (Zscaler) and for days now we have been seeing issues with traffic flows from my link heading to their DC:

|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| WinMTR statistics |
| Host - % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
| 192.168.11.129 - 0 | 922 | 922 | 1 | 5 | 80 | 3 |
| 10.53.39.93 - 0 | 922 | 922 | 9 | 17 | 229 | 10 |
| 62.255.120.213 - 0 | 922 | 922 | 9 | 18 | 230 | 11 |
| No response from host - 100 | 186 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| No response from host - 100 | 186 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| No response from host - 100 | 186 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 62.254.85.86 - 0 | 922 | 922 | 22 | 33 | 243 | 24 |
| 213.46.175.106 - 0 | 922 | 922 | 23 | 33 | 243 | 24 |
| 213.254.214.246 - 0 | 922 | 922 | 29 | 39 | 250 | 33 |
| 46.33.77.238 - 0 | 922 | 922 | 29 | 37 | 195 | 31 |
| 165.225.254.38 - 0 | 922 | 922 | 29 | 38 | 842 | 33 |
| 165.225.196.40 - 2 | 868 | 855 | 29 | 39 | 722 | 30 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|
WinMTR v0.92 GPL V2 by Appnor MSP - Fully Managed Hosting & Cloud Provider 

Its the peak times that are raising a few eyebrows, I'm a network engineer by trade so understand things change continually on the web. I'm going to rip my home LAN back to basics (I'm using Meraki kit internally (security / switch and WiFi AP's) behind my Virgin hub as the WiFi is shocking on just the hub.

just wondered is anyone else was seeing latency issues on the service, its not always been this way. I know the schools are off and the network is likely seeing high traffic, traffic to the same location on non-Virgin links dont appear to be seeing the same issues.

To me it seems traffic is going all over the place to get to Manchester from Wigan, the Geolocation shown for some of the hops is crazy (I understand some of the location info could be wrong if the office location is logged rather than device) but 213.46.175.106, A liberty Global router, is shown as over in the netherlands ?

Thanks

Graham

[jem101 · Accepted solution]

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@Esnw33430 wrote:

Might be worth calling that out so people know when they have an issue that exceeds those metrics then they know who to contact and what info is required, just had a quick look at the game package (with low latency and no packet loss being important for that kind of thing) but I cant seem to find any metrics for acceptable loss / latency for that either?

Thanks

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You will never find any metrics for this simply because VM don’t have any!

To be perfectly honest VM have never made any promises regarding latency etc. on their connections - and to be fair, I’m not sure any other provider has either!

The technology used for internet access over cable is called DOCSIS, and for various technical reason (far too boring or go into now), will always (well actually maybe not, when and if the very latest technology is used) has a worse latency issue than a DSL connection (ie a BT connection over the phone line). On the other hand, the actual peak downstream speed is almost certainly going to be higher over DOCSIS than DSL and it actually can be faster than a direct fibre connection.

So if you find yourself in a situation with high latency and/or packet loss, ignoring raw download speed as these are very loosely related, what can you expect VM to do about it? The answer, alas, is not much at all! Fixing it requires significant investment in infrastructure and sometime this can be constrained by local authority planning issues or problems with actually getting enough power to the sites - and, to be fair, sometimes, it’ll be a cost analysis exercise  and VM conclude that you getting a good connection simply isn’t worth the investment they will need to make, so tough!

The golden rule is simple, if the connection you have doesn’t work for your particular needs then you need to look elsewhere, don’t necessarily rely on VM to fix it. If you are locked into a minimum term contract and need to buy it out, then maybe factor that into your decision.