Slow BT routing - What is up with it?

Its not ilford thats the problem (tho its probably pretty busy there and increasing ping a bit due to traffic levels too) - the problem is the hop before that is everyone joining a busy metro node (seems a lot of people connect via sheffield even tho they might be literally the other side of the country) and then the long hop back across the country to the exit onto the public internet at London.

This is an approximation of what my routing is to get out onto the public internet :( (the red line) - it means my connection is susceptible to traffic levels and failure over a wide part of the country :(

btrt.jpg


I'm guessing whoever who came up with it at BT has never been outside of London and thought something along the lines of "hmm Somerset that sounds vaguely like Sheffield so they must be close".
 
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They were meant to put Metro Nodes in all over the country, Cardiff was the first one, I dont think they have expanded it much, the guy responsible for the updating of BT's network was called Al Noor Ramjii (or was it 1 i?), anyway he came from quest after they had sacked him, BT then spent a fortune, as much as it would take to put fibre to everyones street, for nothing.
They finally sacked him and his team after they did not perform, though anyone who thinks they can replace long lines with broadband must have a screw loose!
 
TB1968 said:
They were meant to put Metro Nodes in all over the country, Cardiff was the first one, I dont think they have expanded it much, the guy responsible for the updating of BT's network was called Al Noor Ramjii (or was it 1 i?), anyway he came from quest after they had sacked him, BT then spent a fortune, as much as it would take to put fibre to everyones street, for nothing.
They finally sacked him and his team after they did not perform, though anyone who thinks they can replace long lines with broadband must have a screw loose!
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Ah that would explain it then.
 
Rroff, about your routing - Don't forget that its probably another quarter of the distance on top of that because of the length of the fibres along roads, not just the birds eye distance ;)
 
Well this is nuts. I just gave it a go and 13 hops? Explains why my ping has doubled when I moved from o2 to BT :(.

As for your problem chris6273, it looks like something has gone very very wrong. Lets see what the BT mods say, I heard they can be very helpful on these subjects.
 
chris6273 said:
Rroff, about your routing - Don't forget that its probably another quarter of the distance on top of that because of the length of the fibres along roads, not just the birds eye distance ;)
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Well it was an approximation :D I'm not sure of the exact route just a rough idea of the BT network and knowing where some of the IPs are.
 
Hi guys - Update.

The mod I was being helped by was very helpful indeed but as you can probably expect, BT Wholesale didn't do a thing. They claimed the VP at the exchange wasn't being maximised (That's a lie because at peak times, my speed drops like a lead balloon as does other peoples' in the village) and they were not able to find any other problems (Despite me documenting it all and completing failed TAP 1 & 3 tests).

I have been thinking the poor speeds may be related to my exchange being upgraded to 21CN in November but I'm not so sure because the DSLAM I'm on is ATM and not Ethernet (Which the new 21CN equipment is) and therefore, it shouldn't interfere with it.

If there are any more packet-loss problems or silly speed problems, I'll post back ;)
 
Just for reference, I use Zen Internet as a ISP and mine has far fewer hops. Mines a ADSL2+ connection (21CN WBC).

C:\Users\Andy>tracert bbc.co.uk

Tracing route to bbc.co.uk [212.58.241.131]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.0.254
2 10 ms 11 ms 10 ms losubs.subs.dsl2.th-lon.zen.net.uk [62.3.84.21]
3 11 ms 10 ms 9 ms ae0-114.cr1.th-lon.zen.net.net [62.3.84.185]
4 11 ms 10 ms 11 ms 82.71.254.134
5 9 ms 10 ms 10 ms 212.58.238.153
6 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms virtual-vip-231.thdo.bbc.co.uk [212.58.241.131]


Trace complete.

C:\Users\Andy>
 
andyd said:
Just for reference, I use Zen Internet as a ISP and mine has far fewer hops. Mines a ADSL2+ connection (21CN WBC).
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No it doesn't, they're just hidden in MPLS tunnels.

The rest of you need to chill out, you're fundamentally misunderstanding the mechanics of traceroute for a start, you need to understand how it works and what that means about the results. You're talking about adding 7ms here or there simply can't be accurately determined from the information you have, what that's telling you is something completely different.

To highlight a couple of hops from my traceroute to the BBC...

6 bbc-gw0-linx.prt0.thdoe.bbc.co.uk (195.66.224.103) 10.436 ms 10.501 ms 13.337 ms
7 212.58.238.129 (212.58.238.129) 9.926 ms 9.282 ms 10.329 ms

By your logic I've gained half a millisecond back between those two. Safe to say I haven't. What it's measuring is response time to that device, which is about more than network latency.

BT's network is pretty dire in some architectural respects but it's not as bad as you're making out generally and there is plenty of resilience in the design. Even I wouldn't much fancy the job of designing 21CN, lots of constraints and plenty of legacy issues to deal with.

Otherwise, well they are a fairly terrible ISP anyway, why expect their latency to be particularly special?
 
Customers who are on BT and use the vpn in work have consistently poor connection. So poor, that when you ping their ip, you get response times of 2000ms. Sometimes it is so slow it doesn't even register, just times out.
 
mejinks said:
Customers who are on BT and use the vpn in work have consistently poor connection. So poor, that when you ping their ip, you get response times of 2000ms. Sometimes it is so slow it doesn't even register, just times out.
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What type of VPN is it?

No doubt BT are interfering with the traffic.
 
Surprise Surprise, BT have done some more changes to my routing for the worse. My ping is now usually 28ms.

I'm currently on a 20CN exchange and it is scheduled to be upgraded to 21CN. When this happens, will the routing be better and quicker because it doesn't have to go from ATM - Ethernet.etc for the route out to the internet (Apart from the connection TO the MSAN)?
 
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