Issue causing headaches for AT&T users during peak hours

[VinzClortho]

I've been frustrated for a while with the constant lag/disconnects but had been thinking it was my own internet service. After actually taking a look at things, though, my internet service appears to be working fine and I can get good throughput all across the country. I decided to start running a continuous ping against my FFXIV server while I was playing and I found a lot of ping timeouts during peak hours (20:00-00:00 ET). The issue seems to be the link between ORMUCO and Level 3. AT&T users can verify by running ping -t's against 192.34.76.10 (the ORMUCO side) and 4.59.178.74 (the Level 3 side). You can see that the Level 3 ping will have a continuous ping rate, where-as, while you are experiencing lag the ORMUCO side will vary wildly in response if it even responds at all. Can someone from Eidos Montreal please contact ORMUCO and have them address their link with L3?

[Allesasi]

Not sure what the problem is. There have been other posts regarding this issue that began after patch 2.55 or so for me and others. Not sure whether this is an ATT problem or SE problem.

[VinzClortho]

It is neither, as far as I can tell. ORMUCO is who SE buys their internet service from. Level 3 is who provides transit between AT&T's network and ORMUCO. The issue is between Level 3 and ORMUCO, so it is on SE to contact them as their customer.

[Korusi]

I did some trace routes and noticed an issue between ATT and Level 3 however. This is probably due to Netflix traffic maxing out the interconnection and jamming up the connections. These internet providers need to reach some deals with each other to provide better backbones or the internet is just going to continue to suck at this rate.

Square Enix has some clout with their buying power so maybe they can make something happen but until the internet providers work together to give us the internet bandwidth required to supply high demand traffic then the internet is doomed to more and more crunching.

[Raist]

Not sure what the problem is. There have been other posts regarding this issue that began after patch 2.55 or so for me and others. Not sure whether this is an ATT problem or SE problem.

More a Level3 problem. Especially the last couple days. Several regions have had nodes flaking out during peak times (specifically, Level3 had some device failures). More ISP's started cutting customers to other peers yesterday because of it. But then that may just slough the congestion off to another network and start bogging down those routes soon (if it's not already happening). For the most part, my TWC has been pretty stable on TATA the last week or so since they moved me to them.

Need to get in touch with your ISP's Tier3 support about it. They are the ones that can put in for the escalation to clear things up---be that leaning on their peers to do something about it, lobbying for more upstream bandwidth at the exchanges, or switching to a different peer. They have resources to conduct a proper investigation and then pull in the proper people to do something about it. Will help them if you can provide some specific details about what you are seeing... tracerts and such are a big help in getting them off in the right direction.

Some posts and such where they have been talking about it recently:

http://status.netnorth.net/
https://www.reddit.com/r/rit/comment...nternet_issue/
https://downdetector.com/status/level3/map/

[Korusi]

It's a complicated issue to be sure but it's on the ISPs to resolve. The interconnection deals are breaking down due to neither side wanting to foot the bill. It was one thing when the smaller ISPs had to buy their service from large providers like Level 3 in order to get connectivity but now these Tier 1 ISPs have networks almost as vast but are letting the bandwidth suffer.

I personally think that it's on the T1 ISP to provide whatever their customers demand in terms of service so if that means paying to improve interconnection on the backbone then they should foot that bill because we pay for access, our bills might go up but aren't they already? Honestly the only way to lower the prices we pay for service (that we aren't getting) is to encourage competition from providers like Google and break up these natural monopolies they have created through backdoor deals and non-compete deals made in back rooms.

In the end as a single consumer we don't have a very loud voice so we have to rely on the FCC and services like Netflix, Square Enix, Blizzard or whomever you are trying to reach to get something done about improving our quality of service. Alas it seems a losing war... I think that some people don't even understand the real problem.

(Fortunately the FCC HAS put in rules to help but it only helps insure that the problems don't become worse it doesn't really stop the interconnection problems.)

[Jobio]

My Frontlines match that I was just in was a hot mess and a half. Me and a few others kept disconnecting and lagging all over the place.

[Jonny_Tapas]

I can't say I know for sure, but I'm also an AT&T customer and what I believe the problem is based on bits and pieces I've picked up from research is that the path AT&T is using to get you to the SE Data Center has flaws along the way.

Some notes from my end:

Yes it tends to be most common in the evening
AT&T service is performing to Spec according to Speedtest and my livestream software during heavy in-game lag.
When using WTFast GPN all lag is eliminated. (GPN gives you an optimized route to the data center.)

It's becoming easier to believe that AT&Ts route is the issue here.

[aresgodofwar30]

I am also suffering from this oversight. SE, please kick ORMUCO to the curb and get a new ISP.
I tried calling ATT and asking to get a different route, but the support doesn't understand and they transfer me to their paid PC support. They do not understand latency and lost packets.

[Raist]

I am also suffering from this oversight. SE, please kick ORMUCO to the curb and get a new ISP.
I tried calling ATT and asking to get a different route, but the support doesn't understand and they transfer me to their paid PC support. They do not understand latency and lost packets.

Sounds like you were still dealing with Tier1 support. As stated earlier, you need escalation to a higher tier. More specifically, you need a Tier3 tech. AT&T has plenty of them. If they give you the run-around, push to talk to a supervisor.

Alternatively, you could try their online support paths. If you do twitter/Facebook you can get links to their accounts and such from the AT&T page at www.downdetector.com/companies.