Slow access to BBC News site

SkyRider17 · ‎07-04-2012

I have Business Infinity. For the past 2 weeks or so I have been suffering with slow, effectively no, access to BBC News site. If I visit the home page it takes *ages* to load the vast majority of times. The page is just blank, although sometimes the BBC page banner appears. Nothing further happens - I give up waiting normally.

Infrequently I get lucky and the homepage renders normally, but then I click a link and that just hangs.

This happens with IE, FFox, Chrome. I have flushed caches etc. All other websites I visit behave normally.

I think this is BT-related problem because when I switch to use my (slow) Sky broadband link then BBC is back to normal. Switching back to BT fails again - and all this happens without changing my browser instance.

There is a similar thread in the BT Residential forum. http://community.bt.com/t5/BT-Infinity/BBC-website-slow-today/td-p/429927/page/2 Is anyone else seeing this? (I'm in Basingstoke, Hampshire).

Is it worth logging this as a fault with BT? Will it be investigated or will my PCs be blamed since all other sites work OK?

Thanks.

Buff3r · ‎07-04-2012

Be/O2 are having same problems, might be BBC side

kuerten · ‎07-04-2012

Hi Sky. You can also check if there's a hop that has high latency here. Please run a traceroute to the url: www.bbc.co.uk ( Don't know yet if this is the site that you are referring to.)

Paste it here. It would show us which hop has a high latency if this is a network issue.

SkyRider17 · ‎08-04-2012

Thanks for your interest. It seems any reference to BBC News site is affected, other parts of BBC seem to be OK.

Here's some tracert output from yesterday and today - the timeout at hop 11 is consistent across many tests.

I also did the tracert when connected to Sky (posted below too) and also get timeouts, but the news site works fine. I don't know what to make of this. Who should I report this to? Thanks.

With BT:

C:\>tracert news.bbc.co.uk

Tracing route to newswww.bbc.net.uk [212.58.246.80]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms <1 ms 1 ms 192.168.1.254
2 1 ms 7 ms 6 ms 217.32.147.0
3 9 ms 8 ms 8 ms 217.32.147.30
4 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms 213.120.177.66
5 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms 217.41.168.231
6 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms 217.41.168.109
7 11 ms 9 ms 9 ms 109.159.249.236
8 22 ms 21 ms 22 ms core2-te0-0-0-2.ealing.ukcore.bt.net [109.159.249.155]
9 12 ms 11 ms 11 ms peer2-xe11-1-0.telehouse.ukcore.bt.net [109.159.254.118]
10 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms 194.74.65.42
11 * * * Request timed out.
12 14 ms 13 ms 13 ms ae0.er01.cwwtf.bbc.co.uk [132.185.254.93]
13 15 ms 13 ms 16 ms 132.185.255.165
14 14 ms 12 ms 13 ms bbc-vip001.cwwtf.bbc.co.uk [212.58.246.80]

Trace complete.

C:\>tracert news.bbc.co.uk

Tracing route to newswww.bbc.net.uk [212.58.246.81]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 2 ms 1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.254
2 2 ms 8 ms 6 ms 217.32.147.0
3 10 ms 8 ms 8 ms 217.32.147.46
4 12 ms 12 ms 10 ms 213.120.177.66
5 12 ms 10 ms 10 ms 217.41.168.231
6 12 ms 9 ms 9 ms 217.41.168.109
7 12 ms 10 ms 10 ms acc2-10GigE-0-1-0-6.l-far.21cn-ipp.bt.net [109.159.249.222]
8 15 ms 21 ms 22 ms core2-te0-0-0-0.ealing.ukcore.bt.net [109.159.249.153]
9 13 ms 11 ms 11 ms peer2-xe9-1-0.telehouse.ukcore.bt.net [109.159.254.114]
10 14 ms 12 ms 12 ms 194.74.65.42
11 * * * Request timed out.
12 14 ms 13 ms 12 ms ae0.er01.cwwtf.bbc.co.uk [132.185.254.93]
13 14 ms 16 ms 13 ms 132.185.255.165
14 14 ms 13 ms 13 ms bbc-vip002.cwwtf.bbc.co.uk [212.58.246.81]

Trace complete.

With Sky:

C:\>tracert news.bbc.co.uk

Tracing route to newswww.bbc.net.uk [212.58.244.56]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.0.1
2 35 ms 33 ms 33 ms cr3.thbz.uk.easynet.net [195.189.159.223]
3 31 ms 30 ms 30 ms 82.111.105.161
4 37 ms 37 ms 37 ms te0-1-0-2.er11.thlon.ov.easynet.net [89.200.135.99]
5 34 ms 34 ms 33 ms 212.58.238.189
6 * * * Request timed out.
7 * * * Request timed out.
8 35 ms 33 ms 34 ms ae0.er01.telhc.bbc.co.uk [132.185.254.109]
9 89 ms 37 ms 35 ms 132.185.255.148
10 37 ms 37 ms 38 ms bbc-vip101.telhc.bbc.co.uk [212.58.244.56]

Trace complete.

MHC · ‎08-04-2012

The time outs could just be that the nodes are set to not respond to pings ...

With your problem can I suggest you check your MTU and RWIN settings - on both PC and Hub. ADSL - 1500 (max) for MTU and with VDSL (Infinity) 1492.

Incorrect size of MTU can easily result in pages being slow to load. Try taking the PC's MTU down to 1400 ish and trying then gradually increasing it.

KarenPole · ‎09-04-2012

Am having exactly the same problem when connecting to BBC news via the Infinity service. We have three laptops in the house and all are experiencing the same issues. I can access the website without any problems when using Wi-F elsewhere.

MHC · ‎09-04-2012

Totally fine here on Infinity ...

SkyRider17 · ‎11-04-2012

MHC - thanks for the suggestion re MTU/RWIN. I tried all sorts of values but no cigar.

Occasionally after a change the homepage would appear and maybe I got 2 or 3 subsequent pages by clicking links but then it would hang on the next click.

I'm using Vista, issued the netsh interface ipv4 ..... command string to change MTU, apparantly RWIN cannot be set on Vista. I tried all values from 1400 to 1500 in increments of 4. (I didn't reboot between changes though, except once which didn't seem to make a difference)

This is soooo... frustrating. Other PCs in the house have the same problem and they too used to be fine with BBC News. But interestingly I have a HP Touchpad tablet (runs proprietary WebOS, based on Linux) which is fine through the BT link. So maybe I can't blame BT or BBC after-all !! (The tablet is wireless, and PCs with problem are both wired and wireless)

I did not change any settings on PCs or hub, so I don't know why this suddenly happened or what else to try. It is just BBC news site references, regular BBC is OK.

Anyone any other bright ideas?

roseywhale · ‎13-04-2012

Hello SkyRider

I cannot offer any help at the moment but am having identical problems to you down in mid Cornwall.

Our symptoms are exactly the same as you, browsing speeds are very poor although line tests on the whole report a fairly good speed.

The BBC site especially is very very slow. i have just tried to open the bbc sport page it now has the banner(yellow) bit only after about 5 minutes and is now onto one picture below it.

We have free sky broadband on our home phone line showing 1.5mbps download and that is 1000x faster than our 30mbps infinity.

will let you know how we get on

cheers

MHC · ‎15-04-2012

I have had no problems accessing the BBC website from my office/home network - until now. Yesterday, it was unbeluevably slow trying to access it from my O2 mobile.

This suggests it is not a BT broadband issue but either with the network provider teh BBC uses or their own servers and network.