topic Re: Packet Loss when router is remotely busy in Broadband

Packet Loss when router is remotely busy

Highside — Mon, 07 Feb 2022 19:49:47 GMT

I have a HubOne that provides internet for four of us in the house.

Normal speed is about 25Mbps.
As soon as one person is downloading a game - even when downloads are throttled way down to 256KBps (so about 2.5Mbps) then others start suffering packet loss which messes up their games.
Attached is a PingPlotter screen shot as I believe it might help.

It suggests to me that packets are getting lost after they leave my house.

Can anyone help at all?

Re: Packet Loss when router is remotely busy

Highside — Mon, 07 Feb 2022 19:54:34 GMT

I should have mentioned, I am on a fixed IP.
Plusnet Hub One | Software version 4.7.5.1.83.8.289.1.3 | Last updated 06/12/21

Re: Packet Loss when router is remotely busy

Gandalf — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 09:57:07 GMT

Thanks for your post @Highside

I'm really sorry to see you're getting packet loss when someone's slowly downloading a game.

I've tested your line today and the tests aren't showing any issues, but there may still be an issue.

Are both computers wired to the router direct using an ethernet cable or connecting wirelessly?

Re: Packet Loss when router is remotely busy

Highside — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 16:05:39 GMT

Hello and thanks for your help.

The packet loss happens whenever anything makes our internet busy - downloading a game is just an easy way of making it busy to test.

We disconnected everything except two Windows PCs that were wired directly to it on Cat5e cables.

I wish I had thought of turning off the wi-fi , as there are phones that may have been connected, although none of them were actually being used at the time.

I can repeat the test with the wifi turned off if that is helpful.

The two PCs that we left connected are called J and T.
When T made the internet busy, J lost packets. (The user of J is an avid gamer and gets very angry!)

The screenshot I posted was from T losing packets when T itself was making the internet busy.

Re: Packet Loss when router is remotely busy

Gandalf — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 20:23:44 GMT

Thanks for the detail @Highside

I've been testing your line again and something's definitely not right as our tests are intermittently picking up on a potential fault, so I'd like to arrange a broadband engineer visit from Openreach to investigate further.

Could you reply to the ticket I've logged on your account Here with when you'll be available for a visit?

If you can post back once you've responded, I'll make sure we book the engineer as soon as we can.

Re: Packet Loss when router is remotely busy

Highside — Wed, 09 Feb 2022 11:42:54 GMT

I have "added details" to the ticket you raised, giving my availability.

Thanks.

Re: Packet Loss when router is remotely busy

Gandalf — Wed, 09 Feb 2022 14:47:08 GMT

Thanks for getting back to me @Highside

I've booked the engineer visit and updated the ticket 221825915 with the appointment details.

Let me know how it goes.

Re: Packet Loss when router is remotely busy

Highside — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 21:18:13 GMT

Sorry to not let you know what happened. I get irritated that so many threads end up with the OP not telling us what happened... and then I go and do it myself.

The Openreach engineer came, did tests at my master socket and said that although you never get zero failures with the test he ran, he was getting 10 to 100 times as many as was usual.

I mentioned that about 200m away there was a place where a spring runs from a field, out onto the road, around a drain, and then down a BT manhole. 100m further down the hill there is another BT manhole where water is usually running up out of it onto the road again. The spring flows continuously unless we have a drought. I asked if water might have got in somewhere it shouldn't?

He took his van and spent half an hour at the manhole and then came back to my house and said he had fixed the problem. The manhole is still flooding but that his test now gave a reasonable number of failures. He said he would report the flooding and that hopefully another team would come and try to do something about it. As I type, it is still flooding.

My internet speed went from about 27Mbps (I think) to about 29Mbps so he did seem to improve something.

But now the bad news. My avid gamer son is still getting the same problem with lost packets. He was away immediately after the engineer came, but now he is back and still complaining about the same problems described earlier in this thread.
Can anyone help? Can Plusnet run any tests or suggest anything I can do to diagnose the problem?

Thanks.

Re: Packet Loss when router is remotely busy

SammyM — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 11:55:30 GMT

Hiya @Highside,

I'm really sorry you are experiencing an issue with your connection and that the recent engineer visit did not resolve the issue.

I have tested the line and it is still looking spot on from our side, is your son seeing the packet loss on a wired or wireless connection?

Re: Packet Loss when router is remotely busy

Highside — Fri, 18 Mar 2022 18:27:56 GMT

Thanks for your help.
I replied on the ticket but thought I'd reply here too for the benefit of others.

There is a lot of useful information in the thread above.
It is a wired connection.

Re: Packet Loss when router is remotely busy

Highside — Mon, 21 Mar 2022 17:54:27 GMT

Latest news:
Plusnet are sending me a replacement router.
I'll try to remember to let you know how things turn out.
If you hear nothing more, then it probably fixed the problem and I forgot all about this thread.

Re: Packet Loss when router is remotely busy

adam945 — Tue, 22 Mar 2022 09:41:19 GMT

Ah fair enough @Highside, thanks for letting us know on here. Just bare in mind too that packet loss isn't always caused by issues with your line / ISP, and can sometimes be caused by issues with the server that you're downloading from, Are you using a VPN service at all?

Re: Packet Loss when router is remotely busy

Highside — Tue, 22 Mar 2022 18:58:52 GMT

No, we are not using a VPN.

I do use the work VPN sometimes, but the packet loss happens when that is not connected.
It happens on my son's PC when my PC (with the VPN client) is turned off. So it is not the VPN.

It also happens on my PC when the VPN is not connected.

Also, I don't think we can blame the server here because as you can see earlier in the thread that I posted a pingplotter screenshot that shows pings to Google.com going missing.
And the Overwatch servers that my son uses are unlikely to be losing packets because it ruins the game experience and everyone would complain.

Overwatch flashes a little icon up when packets are lost. While he is playing, he is talking to his friends that are connected to the same servers playing the same game and they do not have the same problem.

Thanks for following this up.
If there any diagnostics I can run or troubleshooting I can do that spring to mind please let me know.

I must admit. I am a little sceptical that the router is going to help since pingplotter suggests that the pings are going missing outside my house. But maybe it is wrong about that (after all, how can it really know...?).

The new router is worth a try anyway!

Re: Packet Loss when router is remotely busy

Gandalf — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 10:14:48 GMT

Hi there,

I'm really sorry to see the engineers efforts hadn't got to the bottom of the issue.

The odd high latency or time-out on a traceroute can be expected, as those hops/servers may just be "rate limiting ICMP" which means they're not wanting to respond back to your ping as they're busy routing traffic.

However, looking at this again, the pingplotter you've run is interesting, because the latency spikes at hop 3 and continues on to the end at roughly the same level. Let's see how it goes once you've got your new Hub Two. We've put that in the post last night, so you should hopefully receive it today or tomorrow.

If anything, that'll open up an opportunity for you to carry out some further diagnostics so I'd recommend setting up a ThinkBroadband Quality Monitor here > https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality and posting up a link to it here, so I can see what things look like over a day or so while your son's gaming.

You can't set that up with the Hub One (without exposing one of your devices to the world wide web with no firewall), because the router doesn't respond to ICMP/ping requests, but you can set it up with the Hub Two.

Keep me posted on how you get on.

Re: Packet Loss when router is remotely busy

Highside — Sun, 03 Apr 2022 20:42:52 GMT

New router installed OK.

I had to manually set up my PlusNet username and password, which I did not notice mentioned anywhere in the instructions, but it is connected OK now.

I thought I'd give it a few days to bed in and then forgot all about it for a while.

Unfortunately I am told that Overwatch is still reporting packet loss so have come back to this to set up the thinkbroadband monitor as you suggest below.

I notice that then Downstream Sync speed of the Hub Two is 27.61 Mbps which is slightly slower than the HubOne and also slower than my guaranteed minimum speed.

The Live Graph I have set up is at:

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality/share/f848d870ffff649799bd9a9d2b5e414079031795

Although at the moment I don't think I have set it up correctly as it is showing that it is dropping all packets.

I will post this and troubleshoot

Re: Packet Loss when router is remotely busy

Highside — Sun, 03 Apr 2022 21:09:19 GMT

Turned on the "Allow incoming ping requests" on the Hub Two Advanced Settings Firewall.
Graph is filling in OK now.
Thanks for your help.

Re: Packet Loss when router is remotely busy

Highside — Sun, 03 Apr 2022 21:44:53 GMT

On more post and I'm off to bed.
See

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality/share/f848d870ffff649799bd9a9d2b5e414079031795

At 10:20 there is a little blip on the blue average latency and a tiny blip of red dropped packets.
This corresponded to me downloading a 512MB file.
Someone is watching HD TV at the same time so average download speed was very roughly 20Mbps and it took about 4 minutes.
As I understand it, losing a few ping packets when making the link busy is possibly to be expected (is that right..?)
The trouble is the packets that Overwatch loses under the same circumstances are not ping packets but crucial data.

Re: Packet Loss when router is remotely busy

Highside — Mon, 04 Apr 2022 19:37:39 GMT

This should be a link to the trace for 4/4/2022:

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality/share/13a5a63f6703b2e16a07f36b40c81cb958e66512-04-04-2022

At around 8pm we loaded up the internet with my PC downloading a large file while others were watching video and Jonathan played Overwatch, generally hammering the keyboard like mad as you do with these games. He saw what he characterised as "quite a lot" of packet loss, enough to spoil a game. From what I saw, the timing was random but the "packet loss" icons were flashing once every few seconds on average.

On the thinkbroadband trace above, the blip in the blue average latency around 8pm, where it goes from around 20ms to around 35ms, corresponds to this busy period (The time on the axis is not very accurate, the blip appears at a different time each time I look at it!)

The small red blip at the top of the screen at the same time seems to show the problem. It must only be 1 or maybe 2% loss, but this seems to correspond with enough loss in Overwatch to spoil the game.

I hope this gives someone something to go on.

I note that the flooded BT man-hole just down the road still has water running UP OUT of it, so any connections down there are still getting a very hard time!

Re: Packet Loss when router is remotely busy

Anoush — Mon, 04 Apr 2022 21:58:00 GMT

Cheers for the updates and setting up the TBB graph!

In general the graphs look OK to my eye. The occasional lost packet is probably fine, but to see that happen when someone’s downloading is concerning, and I know how even a bit of packet loss can ruin a game.

Tied in with that as your speeds are slower than expected, and the manhole is flooded, I’d say that there’s definitely a problem which needs another engineer looking into.

I was hoping the Hub Two would help, though I too wasn’t 100% confident it would solve the whole issue, but it’s opened up an avenue for these diagnostics.

Incidentally, Bob's post here > https://community.plus.net/t5/My-Router/Hub-2-speed-difference/m-p/1857798/highlight/true#M30960 may explain the difference in speed between a Hub One and Hub Two a little better than I could.

I’m out of the office now until Wednesday. I’m happy to take a closer look when I’m back, and we may end up needing to arrange that engineer. If so, I’ll escalate this to encourage a more thorough investigation it seems to try to get to the bottom of the problem.

In the meantime, try calling Openreach’s damage reporting number tomorrow > https://www.openreach.com/help-and-support/damage-health-and-safety to let them know about that flooded manhole and see if they can help as that doesn’t sound good at all.

Let me know how it goes

Re: Packet Loss when router is remotely busy

Highside — Mon, 04 Apr 2022 22:48:42 GMT

Thanks for following this up Anoush.
I will try to report the damage tomorrow.
The Openreach engineer that came here the first time saw the flooded manhole. He opened it up and did some work in it and said that it had improved my connection. When I pointed out it was going to flood again he said he would report it and another team would deal with the flooding. It will do no harm to report it again though.

The Hub Two is sitting constantly at Downsync of 27.61Mbps, Upsync 5.266Mbps. These were the numbers I saw when it first connected and they have remained constant. It must be a couple of weeks now. So I think it has done its bedding in.

I'll look out for your follow-up after Wednesday.

It is a big deal for Jonathan to not be able to play Overwatch. I think that as far as he is concerned, that is pretty much the whole point of the internet! 🙂