Latencies...is it Telkom...or your ISP?

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Mr Anderson

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Hi guys,

I, like many of you, have a problem during the day when trying to play any game like Battlefield 2 for example. My pings to the SGS servers are 400ms-500ms. This was NOT always the case. For the first month that I've had ADSL I could play any game anytime of the day and have a ping of about 40ms max. This has recently changed and now, for some reason, even after 18:00 my pings to the SGS servers will still be in the 100ms region.

I have reported this to my ISP (WebAfrica) and they were extremely quick to point out that it is Telkom. I phoned Telkom and they then said it was my ISP's responsibility to report the problem to SAIX and ask them WHY my connection to saix was so slow.

I also provided a traceroute going to saix.net and it showed the first hop to telkom was fine, 25ms. Then after the 2nd hop it would shoot to 100ms, and then from there it would go to 400ms.

By looking at the first hop and seeing the normal latency of about 25ms I can prove that my physical LINE is running fine. If it was my line it would have been 400ms from the start. However...I pointed out to telkom that the latency begins somewhere in their network and they in turn said, yes, it seems to be where I try to connect to SAIX.

I asked if it was not their duty to report this to SAIX and they quite promptly replied: "No, it is your ISP's job to do that". Their reason for saying this is because according to Telkom, if your line-speed is normal (which mine is) and your first hop's latency is normal (which it is at 25ms) then it means the line is fine and it's not in their hands anymore. Who is left? MY ISP.

I have a normal SAIX WebAfrica Account. I am already upset with the fact that I cannot play games during the day, but as of last night I seem to have trouble with games during the evening as well. This has become unacceptable and I would VERY much like someone from WebAfrica to comment on this.

My only other alternative would be to cancel my account with WebAfrica and move to someone like SAOL or whatever and see if my Pings decrease and return to normal. But that does seem a bit drastic as I've been happy with the service from WebAfrica so far.

I would just like to know what are our ISP's doing about the issue we are experiencing regarding Latency. It seems that they are just referring customers to Telkom and that is NOT very professional. IS user had the same issue recently and their ISP's collected logs and tracerts from users and tried their best to resolve the issue.

I just think that SOME ISP's need to realize that the fault is NOT always with the customer or Telkom and that they themselves MIGHT actually have an issue that they need to tend to.
 
If it is Telkom then I think we need to urge our ISP to start taking this up with them. I cannot log a latency fault with Telkom Technical support because like I said, the physical line is fine. If it is indeed Telkom then the problem is somewhere within their network and the ONLY people who they will listen to is an ISP...not an individual customer. This is the point that I'm trying to make.

Our ISP's are not doing anything to help their customers.
 
My theory - Telkom/SAIX is running out of infrastructure capacity, hence the poor latency during business hours. Why else would they announce to spend R30 billion over the next five years upgrading their network.

Poor latency/packet loss only happens when their is not enough bandwidth capacity somewhere between two end points. As you stated it seems as if the bottleneck occurs somewhere in the Telkom/SAIX network, and there is nothing WebAfrica can do to fix this.
 
I have a friend that has a SAOL account and he told me that he played BF2 yesterday afternoon at 15:00 and had a normal latency of 30-50ms. I'm going to check my latencies again this afternoon and then I'm going to use his account details (with his permission of course) on my router and I want to see if the latency comes down.

If I get a normal latency using his account details on my router at home it means it's NOT telkom but my ISP.

I'll be sure to post my findings on here. Somewhere someone has to make a scene in order to get things done, and if that someone needs to be me, so be it!
 
I generally apply this rule of thumb:

Are you unhappy? Then it's Telkom
 
Hi guys and girls,

I promised I would reply with my findings but I feel a bit dumb-struck. As luck would have it, they day that I decide to do some thourough testing on my connection to determine where exactly the issue is, everything is working 100% again. For the first time in 2 weeks my pings during business hours are less than 70ms. This is what it is supposed to be like so somewhere someone did something and everything is back to normal again.

As soon as this problem rears it's ugly head again (which I'm sure it will) I'll do the trouble-shooting as promised and I'll let you know. For now...let's hold thumbs that it keeps on working.
 
Dunno about it being ok again. This from a Webafrica account:
Tracing route to www.saix.net [196.25.1.200]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.0.1
2 * * * Request timed out.
3 * * * Request timed out.
4 * * * Request timed out.
5 * * * Request timed out.
6 * * * Request timed out.
7 12 ms 13 ms 13 ms wblv-ip-www-1.telkom-ipnet.co.za [196.25.1.200]


Trace complete.

C:\Documents and Settings\Kane>
 
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