Leased line + latency issues

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Milton Keynes
Hi all

So we had a leased line installed recently. Part of a shared setup with other businesses in our business park. They have it split off into chunks, so you pay for say 2MB a month etc.

Now at first everything was fine, then the landlord who has paid for all this, has been trying to get people onto higher speeds so he can reclaim more for his investment.

Anyways, in true drug dealer fashion, he gave everyone a free upgrade for a week to try before you buy, then put everyone back down to their previously agreed speeds.

Since we went back down, the latency has been atrocious and pretty much unusable. On speed tests we get the speeds we are paying for, however just making a connection in the first place can take from 5-20 seconds. It fluctuates so sometimes its bearable, and other times you cant really get anything done with it.

Now we are running a smoothwall setup here, and before I go pointing the finger I thought I would make sure that seems ok, and it was. I got the landlord to put me in touch with one of the techies who installed the on site infrastructure (although the line itself is BT iirc, 100mb line dialed back to 20mb), and he seems to think everything is ok their end. I dont think he is lieing, he seems like a pretty sound chap. We had a few geeky convo's when he was on site so I trust he's not just saying its ok without checking.

Also to note, none of the other businesses are complaining about issues. Not sure if thats because they just arent that fussy, or because there genuinely isnt a problem.

Not sure where to go really. Our setup hasn't changed, and something changes their end and it all goes ***s up. Any ideas for troubleshooting the problem? Was thinking of trying to get some software running that will say ping google every 10 seconds all day and record the response times, not sure what else to do though.

Ideas? :cool:
 
never had the pleasure of dealing with leased or managed lines. At one point was ready to pay £350/month for 1Mbit/1Mbit at a serviced office but forced them to give us a BT line for ADSL2+ instead!

Try Pingplotter for recording latency.
 
I would suggest as a first point of troubleshooting this and to rule out any devices on your LAN causing an issue that you plug a laptop directly into your connection configured with the correct IP etc, and then see how the line performs, if you still have the latency, then its either a fault with the circuit, or maybe its how the landlord has done his config to rate-limit you.

Syngrss
 
As Syngress suggested; try (during out-of-office time) disconnecting the WAN link to the smoothwall and connecting just a laptop to that; this rules out all devices in your LAN and the smoothwall itself. Check and see if the performance issue remains.

If the issue does remain, point the finger at perhaps your cabling (I guess the fibre goes to one point then it's CAT-5e or CAT-6 from there?), or their router/switch (bad switch port?)
 
thanks for the tips, in the end they did something their end and it seems to have solved the problem. will probably run that ping tool to monitor the situation

:cool:
 
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