Fastpath / Interleaved

stoofa · 10 May 2018 at 19:28

So I was browsing another forum and reading about people "forced onto Interleaved" connections and now their speeds are slower, their pings are higher.
These people are then told there is nothing that can be done - instability on the line has forced it and your telco cannot manually change the profile.

Having a nice quick fibre connection (my speed tests give me more or less as good as you can get on a 80/20 connection) and having good ping (11ms to BBC, 10ms to Microsoft for example) I just assumed I was on a good, stable connection and that I must be on Fastpath.

Turns out I'm not, I'm on interleaved.
So what effects should I be seeing on an interleaved connection over a Fastpath? I'm really not seeing any speed drops and latency seems to be as low as ever.
I'm not that worried and I also know nothing could be done - just interested what symptoms I should be seeing on this "inferior" way of being connected?

Ta

Rroff · 10 May 2018 at 19:34

How much extra latency you get depends on the interleave depth - small depths will add like 3-6ms to latency, higher ones can push you upto 30 or even 60ms to UK servers. On the flipside you can get a more stable ping that way which isn't necessarily undesirable.

Likewise speed hit can depend a bit - usually it stops you from quite hitting the highest possible band so you'd lost like 500Kbit/s or so depending on how bad the line was compared to your max sync with FastPath so generally not the end of the world - in extreme cases it could be 1-2Mbit/s.

On ADSL2+ with FastPath I had 10-11ms to hosts like BBC, etc. with my FTTC I get 6ms with FastPath.

Jez · 13 May 2018 at 10:42

In Oxfordshire i get 7ms to BBC.co.uk on FTTC fastpath. If you are getting 11ms from Chatteris i would imagine that you have only minor interleaving.

Swifty55 · 13 May 2018 at 11:36

Have you looked at your stats to make sure you are on interleave?

You will not notice any difference anyway.

stoofa · 13 May 2018 at 15:37

I'm back with my Vodafone router at the moment - it seems to think I am:

A Ping to BBC still nets relatively low latency:

As I said, I wasn't particularly worried as my connection seems quick, stable and low latency and at the end of the day nothing can be changed.
Just wondered if there was a "classic test" to see if interleaved was having any major effect on a connection.

Heinz57 · 13 May 2018 at 17:45

9ms to BBC for me on BT infinity 80mb with fast path from Gloucestershire. Seems the interleaving is minimal based on your result, probably wouldn't worry about it.