Connection troubles during Euro Prime Time

[Lusche]

This has been going on for a long time now, probably several months, at least.
During my daytime the connection to HTC servers is fine, but at about 18:00 (CEST) / 11am CDT it's starting to get wonky. From about 19:00 (CEST) / 12pm CDT on the ping goes from ~140 to 200-240, get high variance, lots of packet loss too. This keeps on until between 22:00-23:00 / 3pm-4pm CDT, when first the ping starts to get better and later on the connection get's more stable again. The resulting warpfest makes plaing at Euro prime a non option for me.

I tried to trace to a few other servers in the general area. Those taking entirely different routes were totally fine, for example to dallas1up.monitis.com. When I found one using a similar route (through frontier.net network), I would get the same bad results as I did with HTC  servers.

Randomly chosen European servers are fine. While I do use a WLAN, I also tested using a network cable, with similar results.

[Bizman]

That reminds me of the early years of AH. The explanation given was that the British banks sent their data overseas during those hours and our connection went through Britain. Maybe it's some Central European after hours data activity there, too.

[Skuzzy]

Unfortunately, Level3 is always going to be a problem during certain periods of the day.  They have the most oversold backbone I have ever seen, but they are cheap so everyone keeps using them.  They are also Netflix primary carrier, which has not helped the situation.

The problems in South Texas in the aftermath of Harvey are causing a significant increase in the network/telecommunications load as well.  All bets are off right now.

[oboe]

I have the same problem with Level3 in Denver.   Often nearly 100% packet loss and lag times of 1.5 - 3 seconds.   I've escalated a help ticket at Comcast as far as I could, finally talking to someone who took the time to really understand the problem, but told me there is nothing they can do about it.   It's been going on a long time.

I'm tempted to try a VPN service to see if that helps.   

It's very frustrating because I can see the problem but I don't seem to have any options to fix it.  I wish there was a way I could inform the packet routers to always avoid Level3 nodes.

   

[Lusche]

Just in time for prime time the route to HTC goes down the crapper, just in time for (regular) bedtime it's fixed again 
I had such things happen before over the years, but never for such a long time. Usually all problems went away after a week or two, at most. Unfortunately, I can't do anything about it either.