Tata Communications - More Lag issues for Europe

[Serret]

I would have replied on this thread but it was closed so I have to open a new one.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-lagging/page2


Up to a month ago I was having no issues connecting to the Odin server.
My connection was stable, almost no packet loss and about 130ms in average even though I was connecting from europe.

Recently however I noticed that I was getting considerable delay when playing and that I was getting a few disconnects.
I've been monitoring the situation for awhile hoping for improvements but it was in vain.
What I could conclude however was that the culprit was Tata Communications.
First I've noticed I'm getting unusually high latency on Tata Communcation nodes, about 165 to 185ms, on top of that my packets were getting dropped and my connection was getting rerouted through Chicago instead of taking a more direct route from NYC to Montreal as it was taking before.

I have made a rough sketch of what happened:


In yellow is my connection prior to the problems.
In red is my connection once the routing has been taken over by Tata Communications.

As you can see it's making an unnecessary detour through Chicago which not only adds quite a bit of lag but also drops a lot of my packets in the process.

I've added a traceroute below for more detail on the problem.

Tracing route to 199.91.189.30 over a maximum of 30 hops

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  router.home [192.168.1.1]
  2     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  3     6 ms     7 ms     8 ms  10.137.212.145
  4     6 ms     6 ms     9 ms  10.255.49.102
  5    14 ms    14 ms    13 ms  10.255.48.86
  6    28 ms    26 ms    24 ms  195.219.185.33
  7   147 ms   135 ms   136 ms  if-1-3.tcore1.SV8-Highbridge.as6453.net [80.231.
158.30]
  8   134 ms   142 ms   135 ms  if-6-2.tcore1.NJY-Newark.as6453.net [80.231.138.
18]
  9   148 ms   140 ms   141 ms  if-3-2.tcore1.NYY-New-York.as6453.net [66.198.70
.22]
 10   134 ms   134 ms   134 ms  if-11-2.tcore2.NYY-New-York.as6453.net [216.6.99
.1]
 11   134 ms   132 ms   134 ms  if-12-6.tcore1.CT8-Chicago.as6453.net [216.6.99.
46]
 12   135 ms   132 ms   143 ms  if-22-2.tcore2.CT8-Chicago.as6453.net [64.86.79.
1]
 13   142 ms   144 ms   143 ms  if-3-2.tcore1.W6C-Montreal.as6453.net [66.198.96
.45]
 14     *      170 ms   171 ms  66.198.96.50
 15   162 ms   163 ms   163 ms  192.34.76.2
 16   173 ms   172 ms   172 ms  199.91.189.234
 17   168 ms   171 ms     *     199.91.189.30
 18   161 ms   162 ms   162 ms  199.91.189.30

Trace complete.

I've already contacted my ISP but this is not on their end, I've contacted Square-Enix support which kindly escalated my issue but explained that there was nothing they could do. So they directed me to Tata Communcations from whom I'm still waiting for a reply.

I wanted to bring up this situation so that it is not forgotten like the last thread did.
And hopefully to bring more awareness to this problem.

Unfortunately on my end there is nothing more I can do.
I believe it is up to Square Enix to put some pressure on their ISP so that this issue is solved, or at the very least bring this to their attention.

I would appreciate if more people having issues with Tata Communications posted their trace routes too regardless of whether they're from Europe or not.

[Raist]

Your ISP's policies have switched you over to using TATA as the routing partner to get you over to Ormuco's network. They have the means to alter your routing back... getting them to do so may take some effort though. Give them all the data you have on the issues and push for escalation to Tier3 or higher (sometimes referred to as Maintenance and/or Engineering). They can and should be able to do at least that much for you. Time Warner does it for me every few weeks when the exchanges get overloaded.

Depending on how they handle it, it may call for a power cycle of your modem, possibly even a reset to default settings and then the reboot to make sure it pulls in a completely new config. Sometimes you can get lucky just doing the reset anyway, as they may have already made changes that just haven't propagated to your modem yet.