I can see that a lot of people have problem with iHug. I'm more interested in what actually is causing this - if this is iHug's problem or just the backend network.

This has been happening regularly since this Sunday, and sometimes over the day as well. I usually test connection by pinging ftp.citylink.co.nz. Normally I should get around 50-60ms, but lately I'm getting this:

$ ping ftp.citylink.co.nz
PING ftp.citylink.co.nz (202.7.6.9): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 202.7.6.9: icmp_seq=0 ttl=59 time=749.6 ms
64 bytes from 202.7.6.9: icmp_seq=1 ttl=59 time=679.4 ms
64 bytes from 202.7.6.9: icmp_seq=2 ttl=59 time=711.8 ms
64 bytes from 202.7.6.9: icmp_seq=3 ttl=59 time=735.4 ms
64 bytes from 202.7.6.9: icmp_seq=4 ttl=59 time=686.4 ms
64 bytes from 202.7.6.9: icmp_seq=5 ttl=59 time=646.7 ms
64 bytes from 202.7.6.9: icmp_seq=6 ttl=59 time=586.7 ms
64 bytes from 202.7.6.9: icmp_seq=7 ttl=59 time=685.0 ms
64 bytes from 202.7.6.9: icmp_seq=8 ttl=59 time=619.4 ms
64 bytes from 202.7.6.9: icmp_seq=9 ttl=59 time=612.7 ms
64 bytes from 202.7.6.9: icmp_seq=10 ttl=59 time=626.4 ms

--- ftp.citylink.co.nz ping statistics ---
11 packets transmitted, 11 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 586.7/667.2/749.6 ms


And traceroute shows:

$ traceroute -I ftp.citylink.co.nz
traceroute to ftp.citylink.co.nz (202.7.6.9), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
 1  192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1)  0.981 ms  0.913 ms  0.931 ms
 2  203-109-128-167i.static.ihug.co.nz (203.109.128.167)  745.904 ms  660.788 ms  575.204 ms
 3  gi1-24.akl-grafton-bdr1.ihug.net (203.109.130.14)  579.094 ms  570.614 ms  554.744 ms
 4  anycast.ape.net.nz (192.203.154.5)  566.108 ms  597.248 ms  691.172 ms
 5  ftp.citylink.co.nz (202.7.6.9)  707.442 ms  532.477 ms  521.234 ms


The latency is horrible. You can't work in SSH because it's almost as bad as dialup and any other application that needs low latency (online games, for example) are just plain horrible.
I don't download a lot (if any) data, but when testing speed I can see it jumping between 10kb/sec to 200kb/sec.


Does anyone has any idea what is causing this? I tried to call iHug - spent 45 minutes on the line and gave up. Of course, 4 e-mails have not been answered (not going into what's causing the problem; their customer support is really bad).

I'm wondering if switching to another ISP would help (Xtra maybe?)?

Cheers!