suspected Iomart Hosting Ltd peering issue

Howdy!

I live in Dublin, Ireland and play on the London gateway. My ISP is Virgin Media and my connection briefly goes through Cogent's network before approaching the servers. The last few days I've been experiencing absolutely hellish latency spikes, and the only thing I've noticed is that almost every WinMTR log reports spikes at the second- and / or third-last hop.

My computer is connected to the modem using powerline adapters, which unfortunately are not as good as a true Ethernet connection. Yet I haven't been having issues with any other online games and I don't believe my home network could conceivably be blamed for problems with hop 10 - home network issues would manifest earlier. My home network is not ideal, but it is stable.

The second last hop is 87.117.211.30, which is registered to Iomart Hosting Limited and appears to be located in Maidenhead. I'm going to be sending all this in an e-mail to Support but thought I'd post here as well. If you are having problems playing on the London gateway, please post a WinMTR in this thread. There is a guide here if you're not sure what to do.





(Grimliver's WinMTR was originally posted here)


GGG, I recognise this isn't a server-side issue. Yet when I talk to Virgin all I get is that it isn't their problem, their network is fine, hey how would you like to upgrade to a more expensive plan. I'm not one of Cogent's customers. I'm not one of Iomart's customers. I've zero influence here. You appear to pay Iomart to host your London gateway servers. They'll be interested in your concerns long before Virgin are interested in my issues with infrastructure in a different country.


tl;dr: GGG's UK-based hosting provider appears to have a peering issue with Cogent. Knowing ISPs, they're no doubt intentionally allowing traffic between them to deteriorate in the hope that the other company blinks first and agrees to pay to upgrade the infrastructure between them.
tl;dr tl;dr: ISPs...

>GGG's UK-based hosting provider appears to have a peering issue with Cogent.

Over the last 5 days I've spent 4 hours and 24 minutes talking with a very nice network guy from my ISP.

He says the "server issues" people are having (from the EU side at least) is exclusive to Cogent from what he tested.

He says he spent hours tracerouting a ton of IP's to various game instances, and we all know how sporadic it can be, it can happen 2 instances in a row, or it can take several days of fast paced mapping before you get a dead instance.


Sadly, there's nothing my ISP can do as it's a Cogent issue, and a VPN might "solve" it if it takes a different route, bypassing Cogent... This is not a solution, it's a bandaid and it sucks. Paying extra just because of shitty Cogent servers is laughable honestly..


GGG, please slap Cogent and get them to fix their servers. It seriously cannot be this broken in 2023, and this post was from 2017?!?!

If Cogent doesn't get their servers working properly for next league launch, you KNOW it's going to be a mess :( Reddit is already fuming every now and then, the pitchforks have been bought... and I personally know 2 people irl that quit because of it happening so frequently, I've told them about my findings but I'm not sure they're keen on paying for a VPN just to avoid Cogent.


The technician sent me these links just as information, thought it was interesting.

The first link clearly shows Cogent being the most used host.
https://bgp.he.net/AS20860

GGG's server hosts IOMART
https://bgp.he.net/ip/109.169.19.133


:edit because i forgot:

I've been blaming Twelve99 for years, because I was being dumb and, yeah, didn't know how packet loss worked. If you get a WinMTR that has packetloss on twelve99, just know that they don't actually respond to every ping, their servers deprioritize ping request, but they STILL answer so that you can see what the servers' name/IP is (blocking all ping requests disable that, and this is i guess what Cogent does, cos they dont appear in my traceroutes, no name)

just try paris, amsterdam or the frankfurt servers, your packets will hopefully take a different way then.

Cogent is everywhere sadly.

Changing gateway is a bandaid, and the routing will eventually land up on Cogent again