AT&T Fiber latency higher than other fiber providers?

Roamer

I’m lucky enough to live in an area with access to three fiber providers - AT&T Fiber, Cox Communications (fiber only - no DOCSIS in my neighborhood), and LUS Fiber (a municipal fiber provider).

On Cox and LUS, my latency is in the single digits to low teens to most of the destinations I test. On AT&T, latency is 2-3x higher. Cox and LUS are both using GPON and AT&T is using XGS-PON, but the problem existed when I had AT&T in the same location on GPON as well.

I’ve read that AT&T’s peering can be questionable and that could, I suppose, be some of the cause of this. But - even to AT&T’s own local speed test server (I say local, but it’s really about 100 miles away) I get 30ms latency. LUS hits the same server in 8ms and Cox hits it in 12ms.

I’m getting VDSL-ish latency on AT&T Fiber.

Has anyone else experienced elevated latency to just about any destination?

I’m using AT&T’s BGW320 as their connection is only a backup and I haven’t felt the need to spend money on the stuff needed to do a true bypass (WAS-110 and a media converter).

It’s not super important - just wanted to see if anyone else has experienced this.

terabitz

Roamer I’ve read that AT&T’s peering can be questionable and that could, I suppose, be some of the cause of this. But - even to AT&T’s own local speed test server (I say local, but it’s really about 100 miles away) I get 30ms latency.

That's probably why you are getting higher than expected latency. What does the broadband label show for you? If your latency is higher than what is shown on the broadband label you could possibly file an FCC Complaint.

AT&T is also a Tier 1 provider, so latency should be lower between endpoints than a Tier 2 provider as well.

cypherstream

I’ve never used AT&T fiber, but wanted to comment that I’ve seen the same with other big ISP’s like Comcast and Spectrum.

I think the large nature of the network means the data just has to travel very far to the nearest aggregation point. These are expensive transit POPs to the internet, so the big players save as much money as possible by only having a few of these. Because of that, they have to ship data all over their own network (cost savings) but at the expense of latency. You can’t cheat the speed of light.

DrStrange

I have Frontier. I have a lower tier service at 500/500. The gateway ping from my phone on Wi-Fi is 6-10ms. That hop is maybe 25-30 miles.

neel

DrStrange My brother had Frontier in Connecticut but we're selling his condo. Frontier has 10ms latency when Verizon Fios in NYC only has 3-4ms.

Frontier is weird in routing Connecticut via Ashburn instead of NYC. Hopefully the Verizon merger will mean it gets routed back to NYC, but who knows?

payup

Where are you located? I'm seeing single digit pings but I'm in Dallas. I did see lower pings and jitter with frontier but we're talking 3-5ms. It seems latency isn't a huge concern for the big blue.

Here's my latency to Quad9, Wired to BGW-320

https://imgur.com/a/VnWQrWb

TC1USCG

payup I have a 25ms ping on AT&T Fiber (1gig) in sourthern MS. We have 2 fiber providers and one cable TV provider. I've tried CoastConnect but they were having growing pains so I jumped back to AT&T. The system in my area, I'm in what is considered "the country" was built on the back of what was UVerse. Was told we would never see anything over 1 gig, but we will see. Now to be fair, I'm going through a ASUS AC5300 to AT&T's ONT.

Roamer

payup

I’m located in South Louisiana. Your latency is similar to what I get on Cox and LUS. AT&T is 3x as much.

Roamer

TC1USCG

I remember seeing your posts on DSLR. We are also on the back of the U-verse system. My latency experience seems similar to yours. However, we do have up to 5 gig available here.

legacy7955

TC1USCG

Hello old friend. I remember you from the ATT Uverse forums on DSLR!

toolman1990

It might depend on how far away the AT&T server is for your local area and the routing it takes to reach the websites server.

DrStrange

neel Just did a tracert to the old place. No Ashburn. I've seen that weird routing, though. Had it back when I had DSL.

payup

terabitz this hasn’t been my experience, the smaller guys seem more willing to peer at the IXP’s and deploy caching appliances at the edge, like Netflix's OCA.

Roamer

terabitz

Broadband label shows 5ms. You may be on to something with the FCC complaint, but they could also shut my argument down and say it’s a “best effort” service. I might explore this.

LUS gets bandwidth from AT&T Enterprise, Lumen, and Cox Enterprise and load-balances accordingly. Even when routing over AT&T, the latency still beats my consumer AT&T Fiber. It’s kind of funny to see.

Splitpair

terabitz If your latency is higher than what is shown on the broadband label you could possibly file an FCC Complaint.

Probably not going to happen resi internet is a best effort service with no guarantees on latency.

neel

payup For small ISPs, transport is expensive as you're leasing transport and buying transit. They want to reduce costs so they'll happily peer with Netflix and use caching appliances.

For Big Telecom, they'll happily haul traffic since they own intercity fiber links, and peering is a business model. They will pay to transport Netflix traffic from meet-me rooms just for Netflix to pay up. For them, transit is effectively free, and if it isn't, paid peering more than pays for transit and hauling traffic.

Pre-Altice (read: Cablevision) Optimum had one big quality: their willingness to peer in internet exchanges despite their size. They peered with many networks such as Hurricane Electric, Zayo and nLayer (now GTT). They had free peering with Netflix. Nowadays free peering is mostly much smaller ISPs like Sonic, Google Fiber, Astound, et al.

adlr

Where are you pinging to specifically? Here's a smokeping plot to 8.8.8.8. At first I was having trouble with AT&T Fiber (initial spike) then switched to Sonic Fiber (great latency!) and finally back to AT&T (bit higher latency, but cheaper).

djrobx

In Reno, NV, AT&T doesn't have a local peering presence. So pretty much all of my traffic goes to the bay area first. No practical destination has a ping lower than around 8ms. Even AT&T's DNS servers are far away.

So even though I have a sub-1ms gateway ping thanks to fiber technology, I don't see super low pings anywhere.

Spectrum, on the other hand, has more local infrastructure. They have local DNS servers and a local Ookla speed test server.

badtlc4

At&t can be very location dependent. In Kansas City, it was not great latency to local endpoints for the longest time. About a year ago, AT&T finally started routing through a local peering group and now I can hit local stuff in 3-5ms where as it was well over 20ms previously.

I have also noticed that at&t areas that are not in the middle of one of their long haul fiber paths (like a radial feed off to somewhere) that latency is not great.