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[Townendk]

You are aware that if the BT engineer finds nothing wrong with your line (and from the stats you have posted there is nothing wrong with it) then you're very likely to get charged £144 + VAT?

Yes I am, although the reason why tech support suggested an engineer in the first place was because, and I quote: "Our line tests have identified a fault at the exchange"

I also need a modern style master socket installing as the crappy old style one I currently have severely limits my troubleshooting capabilities anyway.

[guest]

Fair enough - just making sure you knew

If they identified a "fault at the exchange" then it sounds like its not your line anyway. Faulty line card/mux perhaps. If it is on that side of things then I doubt you'll even see the engineer as he'll just fix it and call to tell you its done.

Did you tell them you wanted a new master socket? Its not something I'd expect him/her to be willing to do if the fault is exchange-side.

[Townendk]

Fair enough - just making sure you knew

If they identified a "fault at the exchange" then it sounds like its not your line anyway. Faulty line card/mux perhaps. If it is on that side of things then I doubt you'll even see the engineer as he'll just fix it and call to tell you its done.

Did you tell them you wanted a new master socket? Its not something I'd expect him/her to be willing to do if the fault is exchange-side.

Yes, I mentioned this to the BT faultline when I was on the phone to them after she mentioned the fault at the exchange - I asked her if the master socket was my responsibility to replace or theirs - she said it was theirs and she'd arrange to have it brought up to date.

Thanks again

[Townendk]

Thu, 2008-01-03 09:12:17 - ICMP Packet - Source:217.160.255.49 Destination:86.135.192.216 - [DOS]
Thu, 2008-01-03 09:16:15 - ICMP Packet - Source:64.81.79.41 Destination:86.135.192.216 - [DOS]

Could this be causing the illusion of high packetloss on the line quality test?

[guest]

It could indeed. If you set a couple of rules to permit all traffic from those IP addresses then that should prevent the router thinking its a DoS attack when you retry the dslreports test. One more thing eliminated then.

I completely forgot to ask if your download/upload speeds are OK?

[Townendk]

Sorry for my delay in response.

BT Did send round an engineer, albeit a telecomms one rather than a broadband one!

He checked my master socket anyway, and told me that everything is fine.

He left, but advised me to get onto BT and get a proper engineer arranged.

However, I'm almost sure now that my issue is due to heavy load on my line/exchange. I booked friday off of work for the engineer visit and all day I played WoW succesfully at <100ms response times. As soon as 5pm arrives, bam! Upto 700+ MS.

This doesn't make me feel any better though - since as far as i'm aware this cannot be resolved by either myself or any engineer

Thanks alot for all your input rizla though, you've helped me eliminate lots of different possibilities

All I can hope for is that once kids go back to school things may quieten down a little bit, if not i'm left with a pretty useless internet connection

[kitz]

Can I just confirm that the gist of this is that your speeds are ok - but come the evening then your latency goes sky high which is making gaming impossible.

Out of interest can you perform a tracert from your PC to a UK gaming server such as clarity.jolt.co.uk 
Then one to your gaming server.

[guest]

I still think it might be the route to the WoW server you use. I'm sure I've heard similar stories in the past but I can't remember the specifics. The test you ran from dslreports didn't show any unusually high latency so I'm wondering if its just the Euro WoW servers with "issues".

Edit - http://forum.zensupport.co.uk/5/28985/ShowThread.aspx

It's your routing to WoW.

[kitz]

>>> I still think it might be the route to the WoW server you use.

That was my thinking - hence why I wanted to see an "outward" tracert to UK and the gaming server for comparison.

>> It's your routing to WoW.

Good find -

This an age old problem with WoW , 1st was BT then Nildram (and a few other isp's across europe) and now Zen.

If Townendk performs a tracert, then we should be able to confirm if this is the same for BT users too. :/

[guest]

It was my first thought but the packet loss shown in the dslreports test muddied the water a bit. I can confirm that it is the Netgear firewall/IDS which seems to cause this as it does broadly the same here on the 834GT.

I think Townendk will find a charge of £169.20 on his next phone bill

[Azzaka]

If i am not mistaken Zen have fixed the WoW issue.

[guest]

Yes you changed the peering/routing to work around it I think, although I didn't read the whole thread. I just found that thread with a quick google but this issue of overloaded upstream transit from WoW Euro servers has happened on at least four seperate occasions IIRC. It affects all ISPs but not all ISPs will bother dealing with it like Zen (on this occasion anyway) have. I seem to remember someone on Eclipse complaining about this at least two years ago - wait long enough and whoever runs the Euro servers for Blizzard will pay for some more transit.

There used to be a way (and I'm really struggling to remember this) to use a proxy to tunnel around the overloaded transit if your ISP won't "fix it". Searching through WoW forums would probably be the best bet to find out how to tunnel the game traffic over (for eg) http.

Edit - I assume there was a patch for WoW sometime in early December? I can't be bothered to check, but usually that'll trigger these issues as "dormant" players log back in for a few weeks to see what has been nerfed/buffed.

[Townendk]

Trace to WoW server during 400-1000ms 1pm on sunday afternoon:


Tracing route to 80-239-181-92.customer.teliacarrier.com [80.239.181.92]

over a maximum of 30 hops:



  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  www.routerlogin.com [192.168.0.1]

  2    27 ms    26 ms    27 ms  217.47.19.122

  3    25 ms    26 ms    25 ms  217.47.19.161

  4    27 ms    27 ms    27 ms  217.41.176.13

  5    27 ms    27 ms    27 ms  217.41.176.126

  6    26 ms    26 ms    27 ms  217.41.176.46

  7    26 ms    26 ms    26 ms  217.47.19.178

  8    27 ms    26 ms    27 ms  core1-pos4-1.sheffield.ukcore.bt.net [217.32.171.181]

  9    40 ms    28 ms    30 ms  core1-pos8-0.birmingham.ukcore.bt.net [62.6.204.146]

 10    32 ms    34 ms    34 ms  core1-te0/5/0/4.ilford.ukcore.bt.net [194.74.77.173]

 11    32 ms    32 ms    31 ms  transit2-gig7/0/0.ilford.ukcore.bt.net [194.74.77.174]

 12    33 ms    33 ms    34 ms  t2c2-ge14-0-0.uk-ilf.eu.bt.net [166.49.168.121]

 13    32 ms    32 ms    32 ms  t2c1-p3-3.uk-lon1.eu.bt.net [166.49.164.97]

 14    33 ms    34 ms    33 ms  t2a1-ge4-0-0.uk-lon1.eu.bt.net [166.49.135.102]

 15    34 ms    34 ms    34 ms  166-49-211-34.eu.bt.net [166.49.211.34]

 16    34 ms    34 ms    34 ms  ldn-bb1-link.telia.net [80.91.251.18]

 17    40 ms    39 ms    40 ms  prs-bb1-link.telia.net [80.91.254.209]

 18    40 ms    46 ms    39 ms  prs-b4-link.telia.net [80.91.251.114]

 19    40 ms    40 ms    41 ms  prs-nant-ks51-geth0-1.telia.net [213.248.98.74]

 20     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 21     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 22     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 23     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 24     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 25     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 26     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 27     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 28     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 29     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 30     *        *        *     Request timed out.



Trace complete.


Trace to Jolt:



Tracing route to clarity.jolt.co.uk [195.149.21.11]

over a maximum of 30 hops:



  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  www.routerlogin.com [192.168.0.1]

  2    27 ms    26 ms    26 ms  217.47.19.122

  3     *       26 ms    26 ms  217.41.167.161

  4    29 ms    28 ms    27 ms  217.41.176.9

  5    27 ms    27 ms     *     217.41.176.66

  6    28 ms    27 ms    27 ms  217.41.176.126

  7    27 ms    26 ms    28 ms  217.41.176.62

  8    27 ms    26 ms    26 ms  217.47.111.114

  9    26 ms    26 ms    25 ms  217.32.171.213

 10    29 ms    29 ms    29 ms  core1-pos8-0.birmingham.ukcore.bt.net [62.6.204.146]

 11    33 ms    32 ms    33 ms  core1-pos0-9-0-0.ealing.ukcore.bt.net [194.74.65.121]

 12    33 ms    33 ms    33 ms  core1-pos5-0-0.telehouse.ukcore.bt.net [194.74.65.122]

 13    32 ms    32 ms    32 ms  g3-14.cr05.tn5.bb.pipex.net [194.143.164.9]

 14    73 ms    43 ms    45 ms  g2-48-5.ar01.tn5.bb.pipex.net [62.72.140.14]

 15    33 ms     *       67 ms  ge-0-0-0-3801.jolt-gw.cust.pipex.net [212.241.241.14]

 16    33 ms    33 ms    33 ms  clarity.jolt.co.uk [195.149.21.11]



Trace complete.

Yes there was a big patch in early december, one of the biggest PvP changes since the expansion launched.

This is all coming together, but the trace routes mean nothing to me!

[kitz]

Although some of those hops may be a tiny bit busy, the actual end result (throughput) is actually ok at the time you took them.
Dont worry about the "timed out" at the last hop - that often happens if the server is set not to respond to pings.

Later on in the evening see if anything changes.. you may spot which on route server is causing the problem.

[guest]

The outward route isn't the same as the return route kitz. Therein lies part of the problem as you don't "see" the true latency. Try using the Telia looking glass to check the real route back - I saw it peaking around 500ms on some nodes today.

Nothing he can do about it except move ISP as the chance of him getting one of the BT network staff to look at the issue is vanishingly small

Edit - Interestingly there are reports that the routing changes at 5pm which tallies with what Townendk said earlier about latency increasing at exactly 5pm.