BT Lines damaged = Bad Pings

[Gavac220]

I noticed that when i connected over the weekend, I had a terrible ping and download rate. I gave my isp (Fast.co.uk) an e-mail, and 5 mins later, I got this response.

Hi Neil,

The problem you are experiencing is due to a major incident on the BT
network affecting speeds and latency throughout the UK following a tunnel
collapse which seethed a large number of very important BT cables.

Further details can be found at www.fast.co.uk/status

You may be able to get around this by rebooting until you connect and get
low latency as we're finding some routes from exchanges back to the BT
network are better.

I'm sorry you are experiencing a problem, but rest assured that we are in
constant communication with BT during this major incident.

Regards,

Mark
Fast.co.uk Customer Services

Explains why the drop in performance, and I thought I'd share the info with everyone else, incase others suffered issues as well. My Isp blew me away again with the speed of response.

[Gavac220]

Restarted my router 11 times, and what do you know? It worked. Had ping 150ms+ and download at 0.65mbs. Now ping is 32ms, upload is 0.755mbs and download is 795mbs.

Hope this helps anyone else having probs. Just be patient - reboot and ping test, and repeat till you get the right outcome

[Stern]

ahh I thought something was odd when I was on briefly last night. Before my pc woes I was getting an average latency of about 6-10, last night it was hovering around the 60 mark. Strangely so were most folks...I thought it was server-side.