An NTL network change around Nov 7-10 ???

[Grant Gibson]

Hi everyone This is my first post on the .co.uk site... and I've got a vaguely technical question for you all...

I work for a publishing company in Glasgow, and we have a range of sites aimed mainly at Scottish internet users -- a few newspaper sites, plus sites for Recruitment, Property and Entertainment listings.

From looking at our web stats there has always been a stable level of traffic across all ISPs on each site. For example, if a site gets 1000 user sessions a week from AOL users in August, you can guarantee it'll be within 10% of that figure for September, October, etc. The same has been true for all ISPs, including NTL, for as long as I've looked.

However, something strange happened around the weekend of November 7-10. Our user sessions (and page impressions) for NTL users dropped by about 75%, but remained static for all the other big ISPs.

My first thought is that NTL might have changed something, for example the way they run their proxies, so that a greater number of users come through under a single IP address... or maybe they've increased the amount of our content they cache?

Also, most NTL traffic seems to come via "ntli.net", but I know my home BB's reverse-lookup is xxxxx.cable.ntl.com. Is "ntli.net" where web-proxied users traffic appears from?

I doubt it's a site connectivity issue, as I have NTL BB at home and can access the sites without any problems.... so I don't think the drop in traffic is 'real'.

Any ideas

Thanks,
Grant.

[albone]

I must admit I had noticed the addy was altered during that time and thought it weird (thanks to a couple of people putting an interesting sig on their postings)but it didn't affect the browsing at the time, so maybe they altered it temperarily, as I do know they said they were working on the connectivity problems that many of us had been complaining of. And (touch wood) it seems stable at the moment, apart from two days ago when they were again doing something in my area. So I am all for the upgrade if that was what this was.

[Frank]

Originally Posted by Grant Gibson

Is "ntli.net" where web-proxied users traffic appears from?

That is correct. Not all ntl connections use this. Domain suffixes of ntli.net, ntl.com, and cableol.net in your server logs/stats signify ntl visitors.

Why did it drop? I have no idea at all. Maybe there was a major outage or something. I assume the traffic levels are back to normal now?

[Frank]

Grant,

After speaking to someone they can say "with fair certainty" that the reason for this is recent cache reconfiguration in that that "renfrew's caches probly got switched on at that time tbh".

[Grant Gibson]

Originally Posted by Keyser

Grant,

After speaking to someone they can say "with fair certainty" that the reason for this is recent cache reconfiguration in that that "renfrew's caches probly got switched on at that time tbh".

Hi Keyser,

Thanks very much for your replies... one of our key areas running through a new cache/proxy would explain the traffic drop perfectly.

The new version of our stats software comes with a 'tracking module' (basically just a bit of javascript and a cookie) which will hopefully restore the unique visitor numbers when we put it in place.

Thanks again.

Grant.