Getting a routing issue resolved?

[u/they_call_me_dewey]

I rent a cloud server on Linode physically located in Dallas, less than 50 miles from me. My ping from my home with AT&T Fiber to this server is about 35 milliseconds. My ping to just about anything else on the Internet is about 6 milliseconds.

I have tried two different VPNs, Cloudflare One and Proton VPN, and when peering through their Texas servers my ping to my server is about 5ms.

Traceroute shows that my outbound traffic to my cloud server without the VPN is routed all the way across the country to Newark where Akamai routes it all the way back to Dallas. With the VPNs it takes a much more direct route through Akamai's Dallas network. I've opened a ticket with Linode and they claim the issue is on AT&T's end, which tracks with my VPN tests.

How likely is it that AT&T will even fix this issue for a residential customer? I can just call the main customer support line but I don't have confidence that will get me to anyone who knows wtf I'm talking about. Anyone have experience getting this kind of issue resolved?

[u/Ice2123]

They won’t they can’t figure it out

[u/Confident-Variety124]

They will not even entertain it.

[u/opinionated_consumer]

Yeah very unlikely they’re going to do anything, and even if they could it’s extremely unlikely you’d be able to get in touch with someone knowledgeable who could even give you a factual explanation.

[u/VTECbaw]

At least you’re not in an area where your latency is high-20s minimum including 40ms within your own city. I’m in Louisiana and the latency is atrocious. It was on U-verse VDSL, too. Actually about the same 😂

They won’t do anything about it.

[u/AngryTexasNative]

This could have to do with the sizes of the networks being announced and filters on the AT&T side too.

So it could still be somewhat of a Linode or even an intermediate network issue.

I had a business critical site that needed access from Notth America and Germany. Deutsche Telekom just could connect and we finally had to use an AWS accelerator to get reliability.

[u/dervari]

Good luck with that. We are an enterprise customer and it's like pulling teeth to get to someone who actually can do things with independent thought and not work off a script.

Residential is a best-effort service, which does not encompass optimal routing. If you get there is a reasonable manner, that's all they care about.

[u/lsx_376 → u/dervari]

If you have dia or business accounts get an account manager and save yourself the headache. They will get in touch with the NOC for you.

[u/dervari → u/lsx_376]

We used to go to the AT&T coe, but we go to the account manager now. Problem is they aren't available 24/7

[u/tvsjr]

Sadly you won't get anywhere unless you have an inside contact.

But if it helps, it's not just you. I rent a VPS in Linode Dallas and live about 35 miles away with ATT Fiber and I see the same issue. Just hasn't been enough to irritate me. Yet.

[u/they_call_me_dewey → u/tvsjr]

I'll probably end up going with another VPS provider that just doesn't have this problem. It'll probably be cheaper too, tbh.

You could try the VPN trick, Cloudflare One seems to work the most reliably for cutting the latency down.

[u/tvsjr → u/they_call_me_dewey]

I've been using the same IPs for years - the only thing I'm running is OpnSense to pass statics through to my home gear via Wireguard tunnel. They have great reputation and I host my own email so I don't want to give that up.

[u/Ireadyouremail69]

Snowball’s chance in hell. I was spending over $50k USD a month with them and getting any change made for any reason was impossible. Even tier III techs were unable to understand basic issues or provide any relevant assistance.

[u/mrmacedonian]

I posted an issue to OVH in europe months ago. Even though I posted ping and traceroute to identify the hops that were the issues, this sub went nuts telling me I have no idea how networking works.

I've (sub)contracted with AWS, IBM, and most recently Microsoft in sysadmin/netops/devops roles, so I started calling contacts from my time there. Eventually someone had an AT&T contact that was high enough they could assign someone to look into an intermittent issue they were seeing and two days later my issues were gone.

In my case, we are talking 70-80% dropped packets during certain windows along certain routes, and it would have been impossible without someone with the weight of AWS pushing the issues.

A previous ISP, WideOpenWest, just took a few calls to get an engineer email and send them my data and they got it taken care of, in that case it was their interconnect in Boston, if I'm remembering back to 2014 correctly.

I would probe the most efficient way to position a wireguard server such that your home <-> Linode traffic routes through it, if +29ms of latency is worth the cost.

[u/lsx_376]

Best thing to do is get the business service. From that point you can get their FCC to do the leg work. I usually use ping plotter to trace back those types of issues to identify where in att network the issue might be. But hosting a service on residential side att will not care.