Ping time majorly out

[Bill]

Bill, you are ADSL2+ I believe . Confirms my worries about adsl max becoming the poor relation

Sorry, missed your post.

Yes, I'm on ADSL2+ (and one who's reasonably happy with it!)

I'm not sure what the intentions are, but I suppose if BT intend to move everybody over to WBC (21CN? I get confused) it may happen... unless it supports fixed speed connections as well?

I'm beyond the edge of my knowledge range...

[glen]

Hopefully he will get knocked out

[Steve]

To be fair, IDNet have told you the reason for the problem.  I don't call that being 'fobbed off'.  IDNet are a small ISP, and although I have no idea of their business structure, I would imagine that the expense of making additional provisions for events such as Wimbledon, would be prohibitive to doing so, especially on a 'temporary' basis.  I bet if Andy Murray gets knocked out, latency will improve again. 

Simon. I agree, however if the BT part of the network is congested there is sod all idnet can do as they have no LLU facility

[Simon]

Indeed, Steve.

By the way, just to show not everyone is being affected by the bloody tennis, here are my pings on GW5:

Pinging bbc.co.uk [212.58.254.252] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 212.58.254.252: bytes=32 time=36ms TTL=249
Reply from 212.58.254.252: bytes=32 time=37ms TTL=249
Reply from 212.58.254.252: bytes=32 time=43ms TTL=249
Reply from 212.58.254.252: bytes=32 time=32ms TTL=249

Ping statistics for 212.58.254.252:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 32ms, Maximum = 43ms, Average = 37ms

[dujas]

Potential Performance Issues(New)

We are currently receiving calls related to performance problems. Please be aware that due to unprecedented demand for streaming Wimbledon coverage congestion over Internet links is resulting in slow speeds for some users.

We anticipate normal service resuming following this afternoon's match.

A Zen service alert. It's not just an Idnet problem.

Average ping for me is 29ms currently, Home Supermax traffic priority could be helping though.

[karser]

Hmm that is strange I thought the problem was directly with gw5, as most of those experiencing the problem who have stated what gw theyre on have said 5, & adsl max. If it is just congestion & not a problem with the network, why does it seem mostly limited to those 2 factors & why have I never experienced this problem for previous wimbledons, or even big football matches.

[Steve]

I believe iPlayer has become increasingly more popular and I would presume that as the quality of the stream has improved so as the bandwidth required increased.

[dujas]

Well the last time a Brit actually reached a Wimbledon singles final was apparently in 1936...

[Bill]

why have I never experienced this problem for previous wimbledons, or even big football matches.

Because Murray wasn't playing so we had no real chance of winning...

[Steve]

Much better now, incidentally Roddick deservedly won.

Ping has started ...

PING idnet.net (212.69.36.10): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 212.69.36.10: icmp_seq=0 ttl=59 time=24.281 ms
64 bytes from 212.69.36.10: icmp_seq=1 ttl=59 time=23.277 ms
64 bytes from 212.69.36.10: icmp_seq=2 ttl=59 time=25.597 ms
64 bytes from 212.69.36.10: icmp_seq=3 ttl=59 time=28.279 ms
64 bytes from 212.69.36.10: icmp_seq=4 ttl=59 time=25.566 ms
64 bytes from 212.69.36.10: icmp_seq=5 ttl=59 time=25.912 ms
64 bytes from 212.69.36.10: icmp_seq=6 ttl=59 time=25.092 ms
64 bytes from 212.69.36.10: icmp_seq=7 ttl=59 time=24.817 ms
64 bytes from 212.69.36.10: icmp_seq=8 ttl=59 time=25.967 ms
64 bytes from 212.69.36.10: icmp_seq=9 ttl=59 time=25.468 ms

--- idnet.net ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 23.277/25.426/28.279/1.230 ms

[glen]

I thought pings would improve after the tennis but no. Just done a speed test on bbmax and the speed is bouncing from 3mbps- 6 down to 4 back to five and taking more time than usual to load a page

[Dopamine]

To be fair, IDNet have told you the reason for the problem.  I don't call that being 'fobbed off'.  IDNet are a small ISP, and although I have no idea of their business structure, I would imagine that the expense of making additional provisions for events such as Wimbledon, would be prohibitive to doing so, especially on a 'temporary' basis.  I bet if Andy Murray gets knocked out, latency will improve again. 

From IDNet's website:

We guarantee no throttling, no traffic shaping, no port blocking, and no contention on our network. No contention on our network is achieved by not oversubscribing our broadband services and ensuring that bandwidth investment exceeds customer demand. This means that we can guarantee the maximum throughput that your line can support at all times.

I hope that your suggestion that IDNet may not be up to scratch on a "temporary" basis is not actually true, because their stated ability to provide maximum throughput "at all times" is a significant carrot that will have influenced a lot of users' decision to join IDNet.

Unless and until ISPs and BT voluntarily or are compelled to publish contention rates, capacity and usage stats - which can't be hard for them to do if there was a will - the end user will continue to be suspicious of ISPs blaming BT and BT blaming ISPs.

If I were an ISP and had empirical evidence that my service could provide the maximum throughput that BT could handle, I'd publish it and see immediately all complaints and suspicions about my service vanish.

And for the IDNet fanatics and apologists here, please don't take this as a serious knock against IDNet. I stick with them because I believe they are one of the most honest and customer centred ISPs around, but I am beyond fed up with hearing the blaming going on between BT and ISPs. Publishing data would stop the blame game in its tracks.

[karser]

9pm is the tennis still on? my pings are erratic now to say the least 30-180 & completely unstable.

[Sebby]

As there have been reports of this across various ISPs, it looks like BT capacity issues. I guess it will still be affected now as people will be watching Wimbledon no doubt.

[glen]

Yep my throughput is up and down like Monica.

[Sebby]

Any ISP who is unlucky enough not to have LLU is going to be suffering, I'd imagine.

[Gary]

From IDNet's website:

We guarantee no throttling, no traffic shaping, no port blocking, and no contention on our network. No contention on our network is achieved by not oversubscribing our broadband services and ensuring that bandwidth investment exceeds customer demand. This means that we can guarantee the maximum throughput that your line can support at all times.

I hope that your suggestion that IDNet may not be up to scratch on a "temporary" basis is not actually true, because their stated ability to provide maximum throughput "at all times" is a significant carrot that will have influenced a lot of users' decision to join IDNet.

Unless and until ISPs and BT voluntarily or are compelled to publish contention rates, capacity and usage stats - which can't be hard for them to do if there was a will - the end user will continue to be suspicious of ISPs blaming BT and BT blaming ISPs.

If I were an ISP and had empirical evidence that my service could provide the maximum throughput that BT could handle, I'd publish it and see immediately all complaints and suspicions about my service vanish.

And for the IDNet fanatics and apologists here, please don't take this as a serious knock against IDNet. I stick with them because I believe they are one of the most honest and customer centred ISPs around, but I am beyond fed up with hearing the blaming going on between BT and ISPs. Publishing data would stop the blame game in its tracks.

AAISP were reporting the same thing, so its pretty much clear that its BT. There was even a post on there site about it.

[Dopamine]

AAISP were reporting the same thing, so its pretty much clear that its BT. There was even a post on there site about it.

Why do you make the assumption that it is only BT? Are you suggesting that most ISPs have so much spare capacity that they can accommodate all the demand that this has placed upon them, and that BT can't? Seems highly unlikely.

My point is that if information was more readily available, and that ISPs with genuinely uncontended networks published that data, then we wouldn't have to put up with blame, supposition and uninformed comments from some users about the efficiency or otherwise of their ISPs and BT.

As with many forums that become the social hub for some of their users, loyalty starts to impact on the accuracy of their claims. I have no doubt that BT has struggled with capacity today, but I'm also suspicious that even if BT had had sufficient capacity, some ISPs wouldn't have had, and that all claims here by IDNet users are based on supposition, not fact. That is where the publishing of data would serve a very valuable purpose.

[dujas]

The problem with Idnet is that they aren't great communicators (although this forum is very good).

No contention on our network is achieved by not oversubscribing our broadband services and ensuring that bandwidth investment exceeds customer demand.

I imagine the important part is the "our network" phase, side stepping the fact that BT's responsibility in the chain, routing the customer's data from the exchange to their network, can equally play an important part.

You only have to lookup what BT wholesale charge for such a service to know there is no way it would be economically viable for an ISP to support a 1:1 contention ratio on that part of the link. They budget for an acceptable average usage. So in times of unusually high traffic, connection performance for the customer suffers, as the ISP can't just in an instant switch on a BT Central to increase capacity, they can only really just shuffle customers between 'pipes' to help balance the load.

[dujas]

AAISP's blog may again provide some insight into what goes on behind the scenes in these situations:

Once again, people viewing tennis on-line is pushing bandwidth massively over normal levels.

Just to explain - at present BT operate with a pre-set level, which we increase gradually over time as we move customers to 21CN or usage increases - leaving some headroom.

Events like this go way beyond the normal headroom, and ideally we'd like to increase the bandwidth earlier than normal to accommodate this. However, unlike the promised 24 hour lead time that BT told when they introduced the 21CN service, we have a 5 working day lead time, so were not able to react.

For 20CN the lead time to increase capacity is 3 months! Thankfully we have more headroom on 20CN because of the moves to 21CN so the impact is not as noticeable. IPSC triallists see no impact at all even though on the 21CN equipment.

We are increasing bandwidth one 21CN anyway soon and BT are making changes in November which will mean we may be able to increase bandwidth to some extent almost instantly, but at some cost. This would be ideal for events like this.

Obviously events like the next Olympics will have slightly more planning...

[Gary]

Why do you make the assumption that it is only BT? Are you suggesting that most ISPs have so much spare capacity that they can accommodate all the demand that this has placed upon them, and that BT can't? Seems highly unlikely.

My point is that if information was more readily available, and that ISPs with genuinely uncontended networks published that data, then we wouldn't have to put up with blame, supposition and uninformed comments from some users about the efficiency or otherwise of their ISPs and BT.

As with many forums that become the social hub for some of their users, loyalty starts to impact on the accuracy of their claims. I have no doubt that BT has struggled with capacity today, but I'm also suspicious that even if BT had had sufficient capacity, some ISPs wouldn't have had, and that all claims here by IDNet users are based on supposition, not fact. That is where the publishing of data would serve a very valuable purpose.

Many of the smaller ISP's were having the same issue Dopamine, if you want huge capacity then I don't know where you will go, the bigger ISP's have huge contention issues as you well know, the smaller ISP's only have a budget for so much bandwidth, having the BBC iPlayer used heavily during Wimbledon as people watched the English hopeful impacted on a few, AAISP's put up a post saying they were having issues, not users but the ISP themselves, there is no easy answer you want small you have small and sadly they will always be limited by funds but they do get the job done in a better fashion, you want an ISP with a huge capacity go find once and suffer the hell you get with that, catch 22 when the net is being used for more and more high bandwidth programs and we have been told more than once that BT do not have the capacity to keep providing more, and that eventually speeds will slow down as the sheer number of users online at anyone time and the pipes they share will just not cope. This is well documented, even if the bigger ISP's put more LLU systems in and BT put in more capacity the use of the net has changed, and rich content HD material is going to bring it to a halt at the present rate unless something is done. But even then can the smaller ISPs afford it anyway?

I am not saying IDNet are perfect, but when more than one ISP experiences difficulties what do you surmise the problem is? You pay your money you make your choices, do some research and you will see future bandwidth limitation forecasts mentioned elsewhere. If you can set up an ISP with a 1:1 contention ratio, keep the user base down so you can afford the necessary capacity for high demand bandwidth applications such as the iplayer and pay the bills let alone make a profit, please share that knowledge with IDNet I'm sure they would love the help, as would AAISP 

[Dopamine]

You're completely failing to understand the issue and my point. What you are effectively saying when you continually lay the blame for everything at BT's feet is that if BT got their act together and/or had infinite bandwidth, the problems would go away. I am certain that they would not.

Most, if not all, ISPs invest in the smallest amount of bandwidth possible in order to maximise their profitability. That is sound business sense but is open to abuse, depending upon how aggressively any particular ISP views market share or short term profitability over long term customer retention through quality of service.

Whatever, making any sort of comment on this forum that might be seen by some (many?) of the regulars as critical of IDNet has always and will always result in the army of IDNet devotees running to their defence, which means that the information posted by users is often little more than uninformed guesswork prompted by a strange sense of loyalty.

Those who keep banging on suggesting that leaving and moving elsewhere is the answer to dissatisfaction also conveniently ignore comments made by me and a few other posters that we accept that IDNet is one of the best ISPs and that moving will achieve nothing, but that the whole ISP business is shoddy, and being the best of a bad bunch isn't much of an accolade. I sympathise with the difficulties faced by IDNet, but they could be at the forefront of change and improvement by being more open with data proving their claimed ability to never saturate their capacity.

ISPs are primarily to blame for customer dissatisfaction, not BT. ISPs continually promise the earth, then fail or are unable to deliver it. A simple "It's BT's fault" just doesn't wash. If BT are the real cause, let's see data to back up those claims. It's available, I'm sure, just never published.

I am not saying IDNet are perfect, but when more than one ISP experiences difficulties what do you surmise the problem is?

That some have a bottleneck at BT's end, some have a bottleneck at their end, and some suffer a bit of both. Those that have a bottleneck in their own networks must love having the ability to hide behind the "blame it on BT" culture that is so prevalent and unquestioned by some. Transparency would solve much of the customer dissatisfaction. After all, didn't IDNet initially blame the Olympics and BT for their network's problems, before eventually admitting that they too had capacity issues? That misguided attitude to customer communication has made me less happy to believe everything I'm told now.

[Bill]

It's available, I'm sure, just never published.

You just destroyed your own argument with those last three words... have you ever tried getting hard data out of BT?

[glen]

You're completely failing to understand the issue and my point. What you are effectively saying when you continually lay the blame for everything at BT's feet is that if BT got their act together and/or had infinite bandwidth, the problems would go away. I am certain that they would not.

Most, if not all, ISPs invest in the smallest amount of bandwidth possible in order to maximise their profitability. That is sound business sense but is open to abuse, depending upon how aggressively any particular ISP views market share or short term profitability over long term customer retention through quality of service.

Whatever, making any sort of comment on this forum that might be seen by some (many?) of the regulars as critical of IDNet has always and will always result in the army of IDNet devotees running to their defence, which means that the information posted by users is often little more than uninformed guesswork prompted by a strange sense of loyalty.

Those who keep banging on suggesting that leaving and moving elsewhere is the answer to dissatisfaction also conveniently ignore comments made by me and a few other posters that we accept that IDNet is one of the best ISPs and that moving will achieve nothing, but that the whole ISP business is shoddy, and being the best of a bad bunch isn't much of an accolade. I sympathise with the difficulties faced by IDNet, but they could be at the forefront of change and improvement by being more open with data proving their claimed ability to never saturate their capacity.

ISPs are primarily to blame for customer dissatisfaction, not BT. ISPs continually promise the earth, then fail or are unable to deliver it. A simple "It's BT's fault" just doesn't wash. If BT are the real cause, let's see data to back up those claims. It's available, I'm sure, just never published.
That some have a bottleneck at BT's end, some have a bottleneck at their end, and some suffer a bit of both. Those that have a bottleneck in their own networks must love having the ability to hide behind the "blame it on BT" culture that is so prevalent and unquestioned by some. Transparency would solve much of the customer dissatisfaction. After all, didn't IDNet initially blame the Olympics and BT for their network's problems, before eventually admitting that they too had capacity issues? That misguided attitude to customer communication has made me less happy to believe everything I'm told now.

Totally agree with you mate

[Tacitus]

You just destroyed your own argument with those last three words... have you ever tried getting hard data out of BT?

I don't think it was BT data that Dopamine was after it was throughput data from ISPs to 'prove' there is no congestion on their networks. 

The issue of transparency is possibly one of the ways that AAISP is making headway.  Their continuous monitoring, the blog detailing some of their problems with BT are all part of a (fairly) transparent communication process and, although much of this has to be taken at face value it is extremely good PR.  The continuous monitoring may be of limited practical use though when discussing problems with BT. 

That said, despite my not being with them I do think iDNet are one of the best around and are always recommended by me.