ADSL Latency - Please help me diagnose it!

[andwoo8182]

So we have a Telkom ADSL line at our workplace in Woodstock, Cape Town. We had a few issues with ISP accounts and routers over the past 6 months, but as soon as we resolved those issues (i,e, found a good account and decent router setup) our line was running perfectly. We have a 10mb Platinum Uncapped account through Openweb that runs on the Mweb network (@dslmweb.co.za) and costs us R4899 per month. Our line syncs nicely at 10mb and always has, and speedtest.net gives us around 8mb/s, so we've been generally happy.

About 3 weeks ago our latency to mybroadband.co.za increased to up to 500ms during office hours, and international latency is even higher! Our speeds are also affected and sit around 0.7mb/s during the day. After 6PM the speeds improve (makes me think the exchange is congested, but the office next door is experiencing no such latency!) but the latency still stays around 200ms to mybroadband.co.za till late.

I've tried various ISP's and routers to no avail (even my setup from home, account and router, which works perfectly in Wynberg) and am beginning to run out of ideas.

I logged a fault with telkom who re-synched the line (lowered it to 8 and left it there... ) and reset the port, and then proceeded to tell me to go to my ISP as they will be able to raise congestion related issues with Telkom (ISP's then told me that I need to go to Telkom for that, which is what I thought originally). So i have logged another fault and received no response yet (same day) and I have also emailed the fault escalation email address, so will hopefully get somewhere with that.

So after all that I'm not quite sure what to do. Our internet conenctivity is business critical, and so we are looking at going for Neotel's Neobroadband 15mbps/15mbps Fibre to the building offering... and hopefully keeping ADSL for added redundancy.

So...
1. if anyone else has any ideas as to what to do with regards to the ADSL line please help!
2. If anyone has any experience or feedback on the Neobroadband fibre offering, it would be greatly appreciated if you could share any info with me!

Here's some extra info... (Right now, i.e. 5PM, the speeds are the best they are all day, but are still pretty bad)

Pinging mybroadband.co.za [41.203.21.137] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 41.203.21.137: bytes=32 time=155ms TTL=51
Reply from 41.203.21.137: bytes=32 time=177ms TTL=51
Reply from 41.203.21.137: bytes=32 time=176ms TTL=51
Reply from 41.203.21.137: bytes=32 time=165ms TTL=51

Ping statistics for 41.203.21.137:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 155ms, Maximum = 177ms, Average = 168ms

Tracing route to mybroadband.co.za [41.203.21.137]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms unknown [192.168.1.1]
2 141 ms 163 ms 166 ms 41-133-108-1.dsl.mweb.co.za [41.133.108.1]
3 141 ms 144 ms 151 ms Te1-1-0.511.cpt-ipc-1.mweb.co.za [196.28.178.202
]
4 121 ms 117 ms 159 ms Vlan92.cpt-hscore-1.mweb.co.za [196.28.179.11]
5 138 ms 134 ms 116 ms TenGigE0-2-0-0.11.cpt-up-1.mweb.co.za [196.28.17
8.97]
6 123 ms 116 ms 119 ms 196-28-178-137.adsl.mweb.co.za [196.28.178.137]

7 143 ms 162 ms 170 ms 196-28-178-142.adsl.mweb.co.za [196.28.178.142]

8 168 ms 158 ms 145 ms 196.44.0.75
9 129 ms 128 ms 142 ms ct-cr-1--tb-cr-1-a.mtnns.net [196.44.31.211]
10 111 ms 110 ms 105 ms tb-cr-1--ct-cr-1-a.mtnns.net [196.44.31.210]
11 141 ms 135 ms 176 ms rb-cr-1.za--ct-cr-1.za.mtnns.net [196.44.31.128]

12 151 ms 175 ms 160 ms 196.44.31.97
13 176 ms 209 ms 220 ms 196.30.1.21
14 174 ms 170 ms 194 ms vlan9.hr3.jnb6.za.mtnbusiness.net [196.30.156.13
6]
15 169 ms 157 ms 170 ms 196.30.213.108
16 151 ms 181 ms 148 ms 41.72.136.53
17 136 ms 113 ms 101 ms mybroadband.co.za [41.203.21.137]

Trace complete.

Any help or feedback would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Pellito]

Do you perhaps have some sort of firewall / gateway box between you & the router? it's odd that the latency shoots up to 120-130ms and stays constant in the trace. try removing it or reduce the number of rules if there is such a device.

 

[andwoo8182]

We don't have any sort of gateway connected, at the moment there are two switches connected to a WRT54GL which is connected to a Billion Modem [the WRT54GL and Billion are from home and have worked fine there]. Im busy pinging from my pc, and I'm getting just over 100ms on average to mybroadband.co.za, and the same result from directly from the router [Tomato firmware on it], but it does seem that the pings are spiking a lot, e.g. just 5 mins ago I was down to 25ms to mybroadband....