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Some customers of UK broadband ISP Youfibre, which harnesses Netomnia’s 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network, have seen their service return to normal after appearing to suffer from a noticeable drop in network latency and upload performance over the past few days. But for others, the issue is ongoing.
The issues started toward the end of last month after customers from a number of different regions, albeit particularly those within the wider NG and PE postcode areas, began reporting higher than normal latency times (i.e. some pings had slowed from c.3ms to 19ms), sharply slower upload speeds (this was not universal) and less responsive customer support. But not everybody will have noticed such changes.
The problems appear to have started on 27th May 2025 after the ISP notified customers about some planned “routine maintenance“, which seems to have gone beyond the usual changes and promptly started generating some complaints via our inbox, the ISPreview Forum and Reddit. We raised this issue with Netomnia on Monday, and the good news is that they finally resolved it on Tuesday.
Sam Defriez, Director of Networks at Netomnia, told ISPreview:
“We recently performed a necessary network upgrade, which temporarily increased latency for some customers as traffic was routed through a secondary path. This work has now been completed, and all traffic has been restored to the primary BNG, with latency returning to expected levels.”
Put another way, Netomnia temporarily shifted some of their customers to a different Broadband Network Gateway (BNG) during the upgrade and then put them back afterwards. But this process lasted for several days and did cause a deterioration in performance during the transition.
The BNG is essentially an access point for subscribers, through which they connect to the broadband network. The BNG is designed to establish and manage subscriber sessions, which it does by aggregating traffic from multiple subscriber sessions and routing it to the network of the service provider.
Initial feedback indicates that many of those who complained are now seeing a return to normal, although some users have indicated that the issue is ongoing. But the episode is another useful reminder of why Youfibre would perhaps benefit from having a central Service Status page to help keep customers informed, instead of leaving them to clog up support channels.