I live in Edmonton, Alberta and use Telus as my ISP. For the last year, it has been great internet. Very consistent speeds no matter the time of day, and only a total of 3 known outages in that entire span (all of which were less than 15 minutes in duration).It's a 50/10 connection that is perfectly fine on speedtest results to the Edmonton server (geographically less than 10km away). The past two weeks have been very messy, though, and I want to find out why.
I use my connection primarily for online gaming. I connect to servers located in British Columbia, California, Chicago, Washington, Seattle, and Virginia. Since last year the pings to those servers have remained consistent, and recently varied day to day, as if the routing to each one is changing constantly. At first anything that went out of Telus' Burnaby data server [75.154.223.209] into the States had a double or triple increase in latency but anything in BC or closer to me had no issues. The day after that, anything in the west cost of the US had a ping of 170 or higher (normally 50) but anything in the east towards Chicago was less than 70. This baffled me because I'm already in the west side of the continent. It was only a problem for a single day and then was done again.
I attempted to contact the network support via a live chat assistant. They were not helpful at all, running me through the usual basic support and taking frequent breaks (one was over 10 minutes just to come back and say "where is the latency") and in fact frustrated me when they said this, verbatim:
"Our network team was able to take a look at the traceroute on the GUI. This is what he mentioned: well if you look at the results. we're talking here about 30milliseconds . I would consider high latency as several hundreds or thousands of milliseconds. Normal latency for a dsl modem is 10 to 70 milliseconds. normal latency on a live online game like wow is around 120-200 milliseconds" So it's apparently a non-issue if my pings have tripled to basically any server that was steady for a solid year, only because they think it could be much worse. They are right, it could be, but that doesn't make my problem not a problem. I have no idea where they get their figure for WoW because if I'm paying for 50 mb/s and getting that kind of ping to any of their US servers, I'd cancel the internet. Double digit ping increases have made it really difficult to connect to favorite servers and forced me to find new ones that are unaffected by this.
There were a few more days with those pings consistently higher by 20 to 50 per IP. Then recently they all went back down to the old numbers - but there's a different issue now. I now have a lot of packet loss, no matter where I ping or what I try to access. My latencies are almost what they used to be, my speedtest to the nearest server is blazing fast as usual, but now I will have to submit a page request multiple times to get it through. If I open a new tab and paste a URL in, there is a high chance it will not even submit and stay as a blank tab. Trying to access popular servers like Google or Youtube can take more than 10 seconds and almost no media like gifs will load fully without repeated refreshes. The access times are insane but if it goes through, everything loads fast. Running PingPlotter to many different popular servers shows relatively minor issues but on the 2nd hop [10.145.160.1] the ping can sometimes spike from 20 to 150 and if I leave it long enough, it can spike up to 3000ms but only at that IP.
I tried changing DNS servers to the OpenDNS public ones, but I read around that it causes issues with OptikTV so I reverted it. I don't know what to do or why I'm paying for this garbage, aside from the knowledge that their other competition in town (Shaw) have a whole host of issues that I'd rather not deal with. I just want the internet that I had for a solid 15 months, not what I have now.
Does anyone else in the city have issues with ping and packet loss recently? Can you try to run PingPlotter and see if you also see that 10.145.160.1 is where most of the issue is?
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