Can someone from Shaw look into routes to blizzard?

[corbin]

Does Shaw share some sort of 'hub' with Telus when routing? I'm no networking expert but is this something that can be looked into? 

No. Shaw owns its own fiber network across Canada and into the USA (Seattle, Chicago, New York, etc).

https://business.shaw.ca/wholesale has a map.

There is no need to look into anything here. The answer is "nope".

There is no Alberta based connection to Blizzard. I believe all traffic goes to Seattle or Chicago before crossing to Blizzard's providers.

[0mirage]

Thanks for the clarification. Yes I'm aware they route through those two cities, I'm just trying to isolate where in those routes the issues are coming from. The blizzard tech had me test the connection to Europe servers to see if the double animations still persisted and they did -- probably to see if a different route does anything. I don't know what that proves but he had some interest in that.

All I know from my own testing is this issue persists across Edmonton at the very least, using Telus as well as Shaw. From other people contacting me it happens in Calgary too. If it's blizzard-specific they can't seem to find the cause on their end so far and are implying its relating to both Telus and Shaw. It's not the first time they've had an Alberta specific thread on their forums about latency issues. Since I have both Shaw and Blizzard looking into it hopefully they can find where this is going on and why it seems to be.

[kingtitan]

I did do the test from my work running Telus 1GBPS Fibre on an insane gaming system. Same 68-84ms latency. 

I will check out the other thread but it does seem Alberta wide.

[0mirage]

Appreciate the test kingtitan‌! I tested it again and brought my computer across the province to my hometown and the same issue persisted on a Telus DSL connection. Also blizzard completely ignored the issue when I reported it. They said they found the issue but they were waiting for a report by the QA team for the cause, so it's been two months since that happened. 

[Frigeon]

Having the same problem, and by the looks of it on the same node:

|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| WinMTR statistics |
| Host - % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
| 10.0.0.1 - 1 | 1867 | 1865 | 0 | 10 | 35 | 1 |
| 68.148.224.1 - 3 | 1718 | 1678 | 7 | 11 | 34 | 17 |
| rc2we-be115-1.ed.shawcable.net - 3 | 1718 | 1678 | 9 | 13 | 36 | 19 |
| rc3no-be6.cg.shawcable.net - 3 | 1718 | 1678 | 12 | 17 | 38 | 23 |
| rc2wt-be100.wa.shawcable.net - 3 | 1714 | 1673 | 28 | 32 | 49 | 34 |
| rc6wt-tge0-10-0-11.wa.shawcable.net - 3 | 1714 | 1673 | 28 | 36 | 170 | 29 |
| ae1-br01-eqse2.as57976.net - 3 | 1718 | 1678 | 54 | 60 | 171 | 65 |
| xe-0-0-0-1-br01-eqsv5.as57976.net - 3 | 1718 | 1678 | 53 | 60 | 169 | 62 |
| et-0-0-29-br02-eqsv5.as57976.net - 3 | 1718 | 1678 | 54 | 59 | 147 | 64 |
| xe-0-0-1-1-br02-eqla1.as57976.net - 3 | 1702 | 1661 | 53 | 108 | 3294 | 257 |
| be2-pe01-eqla1.as57976.net - 3 | 1718 | 1678 | 54 | 59 | 82 | 65 |
| 24.105.30.129 - 3 | 1718 | 1678 | 53 | 56 | 79 | 65 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|
WinMTR v0.92 GPL V2 by Appnor MSP - Fully Managed Hosting & Cloud Provider

Note the stats on this node on both connections:
xe-0-0-1-1-br02-eqla1.as57976.net

[shaw-tony]

@Frigeon I don't see any reports of issues there today. Are you still noticing the same problem right now?

[Frigeon]

Hey Tony,

I am in fact seeing the same problem happening, and tracked my latest 10-ish minutes of playtime before I was disconnected again. I was tracking this via WinMTR, and I am noticing a great deal of packet loss going between my local connection and the internet - this after having tried power cycling the equipment recently and connecting my Cat6 cable from the modem directly to my PC (there's a managed switch in plain switching mode connected to the other port which has also recently been power cycled):

|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| WinMTR statistics |
| Host - % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
| 10.0.0.1 - 0 | 533 | 533 | 0 | 4 | 25 | 1 |
| 68.148.224.1 - 30 | 246 | 174 | 8 | 12 | 20 | 18 |
| rc2we-be115-1.ed.shawcable.net - 30 | 246 | 174 | 9 | 13 | 21 | 19 |
| rc3no-be6.cg.shawcable.net - 30 | 246 | 174 | 14 | 17 | 28 | 24 |
| rc2wt-be100.wa.shawcable.net - 30 | 246 | 174 | 28 | 33 | 40 | 38 |
| rc6wt-tge0-10-0-11.wa.shawcable.net - 30 | 246 | 174 | 29 | 38 | 112 | 57 |
| ae1-br01-eqse2.as57976.net - 30 | 246 | 174 | 55 | 61 | 92 | 61 |
| xe-0-0-0-1-br01-eqsv5.as57976.net - 30 | 246 | 174 | 54 | 61 | 87 | 67 |
| et-0-0-29-br02-eqsv5.as57976.net - 30 | 246 | 174 | 54 | 60 | 85 | 66 |
| xe-0-0-1-1-br02-eqla1.as57976.net - 30 | 246 | 174 | 54 | 91 | 313 | 153 |
| be2-pe01-eqla1.as57976.net - 30 | 246 | 174 | 54 | 59 | 68 | 67 |
| 24.105.30.129 - 30 | 246 | 174 | 53 | 57 | 67 | 63 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|
WinMTR v0.92 GPL V2 by Appnor MSP - Fully Managed Hosting & Cloud Provider

I've also made a post with blizzard and had explained to me that the reason for the high latency on the xe-0-0-1-1-eqla.as57976.net is due to the prioritization of game packets over ICMP (ie. WinMTR or TraceRoute, ping, etc.) which makes sense.

Any assistance you could provide would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[shaw-tony]

@Frigeon sorry, it is a bit hard to read the graph. Can you show me at which point you are losing packets so we can investigate further? I checked into your area and everything looks solid from your home to the node/hub.

[mdk]

@Frigeon -- my results (over a year later):

  2    20 ms    10 ms     9 ms  96.54.224.1
  3    10 ms     9 ms      9 ms  rd1cv-be210-1.gv.shawcable.net [64.59.162.97]  (Greater Victoria)
  4     9 ms      9 ms     10 ms  rd1lp-be1.gv.shawcable.net [66.163.72.22]
  5    12 ms    13 ms    13 ms  rc1wt-be40.wa.shawcable.net [66.163.68.18] (Shaw router in Washington State)
  6    11 ms    13 ms    12 ms  rc6wt-tge0-10-0-10.wa.shawcable.net [66.163.68.66] (ditto)
  7    37 ms    36 ms    36 ms            ae1-br01-eqse2.as57976.net [137.221.73.33] (EQ-Seattle-2?)
  8    37 ms    63 ms    54 ms  xe-0-0-0-1-br01-eqsv5.as57976.net [137.221.65.40] (EQ-SV-5 ?)
  9    37 ms    37 ms    37 ms    et-0-0-29-br02-eqsv5.as57976.net [137.221.65.117] (EQ-SV-5 ?)
 10   51 ms    39 ms    60 ms  xe-0-0-1-1-br02-eqla1.as57976.net [137.221.65.6]   (EQ-Los-Angeles-1 ?)

 11    36 ms    36 ms    36 ms  be3-pe02-eqla3.as57976.net [137.221.68.85] (EQ-Los-Angeles-3 ?)
 12    37 ms    37 ms    35 ms  24.105.30.129

Of course, this path does not go through Shaw (Calgary) or Shaw (Edmonton). Starting the trace from Edmonton will probably change "37 37 35" to become "47 47 45", or more.

PING-times greatly increase after crossing the "bridge" from Shaw (WA) into that AS57976 network.

There is nothing that Shaw can do about "hops" outside of their network.

[Frigeon]

Glad to see it's improved some, I eventually gave up and switched providers and haven't had the same constant dropoffs since.
It was making the online games I was playing at the time completely unplayable.