At the end of June we highlighted how Gigaclear users found their broadband connections struggling during the England v Ghana game with increased streaming putting the provider’s LONAP peering connections under increased strain. The issue was resolved within a few days and new capacity installed.
A user on our forum reported some early morning issues on 14 July 2026 on their Cloudscape broadband connection based on their Broadband Quality Monitor (BQM) graph. This wasn’t particularly interesting per se, however the increased latency in the evening popped out interest.
Richard, one of the long standing Merula (who seem to provide services to Cloudscape) staff on the forums was very open about the cause including the morning issue being a side effect of some router issues from the previous day which was fixed soon after. The evening issue however, seemed to be more specific to users on the OFNL wholesale services rather than across the customer base.
We have been looking at other OFNL users and this pattern can also be seen on other direct OFNL services as well, albeit not all of them with some afternoon spikes in maximum latency from 2-4pm along with minor packet loss as you can see on our hybrid BQM graph:
During the evening the minimum latency skyrockets to pre-ADSL latency levels along with more significant packet loss. This usually indicates very congested or under-performing links.
This time seems to align with the World Cup semi-final between France and Spain, a key match for England, who were going to be playing against either the winner or loser from this match at the next stage (either in the final or third place match depending on their own game against Argentina the following day). The rest is history.
Whilst we can’t be sure on the cause, the timings seem to line up. We’ll keep an eye on tonight’s final between Spain and Argentina. 😉
Update 19/09/2026 — The final this evening is causing packet loss again although this appears to not affect OFNL’s own routed network. We can see them on some resold connections (routes by other ISPs).
We spoke to another network operator that provides OFNL services who on the condition of anomymity said:
OFNL state they are a premium wholesale network and do charge more for it, but we’ve seen more outages, high latency and they don’t seem to respond to issued when they arise.
We have so many problems that they try and blame us for, but we don’t see these issues on other networks connected to the same equipment, only OFNL. You have to persist to get them to address issues on what is clearly a badly designed network. More than once, after issues they deny arise, they are resolved during a maintenance window a few days or weeks later.
OFNL Reseller
ONFL have not responded.
Test your broadband speed
Follow us on X for the latest broadband news 
I have noted impacts showing up on my BQM for most of the England matches and a few others on my OFNL (wholesale) line – it’s really not good as OFNL lines are more expensive than the national wholesale last-mile providers, and in many areas they operate (like mine) are the only last-mile operator available.
Just to add, the WC final is currently on and I’m seeing ~30% packet loss when doing an MTR to 8.8.8.8
Yep we see this too..
So maybe TBB could ask OFNL directly?
We doubt we’ll get an answer on a Sunday evening.
We have a fair amount of OFNL users, we buy layer 2 services from OFNL, I’d say about 5% of our lines show an increase in latency/jitter during the match based on our Firebrick ICMP monitoring of lines, but no significant packet loss on any lines. We also see all the world cup traffic coming in over a single path into our network (from Akamai/Fastly/Etc but they all seem to be using our link to GTT even though we peer with them) whereas we’d expect traffic to spread over all of our paths on a more typical night even though overall traffic wasn’t significantly higher than a normal night, we still had plenty of headroom on that path fortunately