topic Re: Odd situation in Broadband

Odd situation

SteveA — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 20:07:01 GMT

Was wondering if anyone has seen anything like this.

Connection is rock solid with no inbound or outbound errors with speeds pretty much at the limit for my line length.

Then things start getting slugging, sites timeout and my broadband monitor shows this - this is Wednesday, Thursday and today - yesterday it didn't happen

Rebooting the router doesn't fix the problem, only turning it off and leaving it off for a minute or more seems to solve it. The router is an Archer VR600 v2 which I've had for a few years now

Re: Odd situation

jab1 — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 20:33:09 GMT

@SteveA Is this a recent change in behaviour? Have you possibly had a change of IP?

Not really my area of competence, but this graphs do look a little concerning - all the time, not just around the times of your major packet loss, which won't help, at all.

Re: Odd situation

SteveA — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 21:24:39 GMT

the latency has always been like that - the sudden appearance of dropped packets which gets worse is something that only started recently. Nothing has changed, been with PN for ages and ages and on a fixed IP.

Re: Odd situation

jab1 — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 21:32:25 GMT

OK. As I said, I'm no expert on this area, so we'll have to hope one of the more knowledgable people can pick this up. Still don't like the latency, mine has never been anything like that while I've been with my current ISP, even on FTTC.

Re: Odd situation

SteveA — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 21:55:34 GMT

As I said its always been choppy like that - but at over 700m from the cabinet it's just something I've always accepted - and it's never caused a problem.

Re: Odd situation

PhilipHeyes — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 09:00:20 GMT

I puzzle over the value of BQM because it does not tell us where the delay / loss occurs.

Local faults on FTTC & ADSL are often seen in loss of sync speed in response to changes in line loss & line noise.

Re: Odd situation

SteveA — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 11:44:00 GMT

I've never really taken much notice of the latency monitoring - but I do know if I do something like download an ISO image for Linux / Windows then they do spike and the blue bit gets a lot bigger. I don't find the lag a problem at all as I'm not a gamer.

But the packet loss does seem to be useful and accurately matches the connection degradation. As BQM are pinging the router I guess it could be the router having issues but why does a reboot not fix it, only a power down.

Sync speed is solid

Re: Odd situation

Dan_the_Van — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 12:15:15 GMT

@SteveA

To get the picture from your network I would consider using mtr,

available as a GUI for windows https://winmtr.net/

or for linux

sudo apt update && sudo apt install mtr

personally I would use linux as it has more options.

Re: Odd situation

markhawkin — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 19:05:04 GMT

I would be reading this as something started using cloud backup and starting to overfill the upstream capacity.

The first day it did a lot, second and third, less.

OneDrive might be my first suspect (turned on or changed after a Microsoft update).

It COULD be wider network congestion but somthing at home would be my starting point.

The TP-Link does support Quality of Service (QoS) which might stop the whole network grinding to a halt but from a quick Google there may be issues with using QoS on this device.

Re: Odd situation

SteveA — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 19:41:16 GMT

@markhawkin - One-Drive got me in the past that way but the only Windows PC that is regularly on is the cube we have running as a media player and that's not signed into the cloud. It's possible it's my wife's PC but she uses it a couple of times a week. Will keep a close eye on if she's using it the next time it happens.

Re: Odd situation

markhawkin — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 10:59:41 GMT

I’m getting more interested in this than perhaps I should but anyway….

The TP-Link seems to have a bit of traffic monitoring (turned on in system tools, statistics).

It seems to allow each IP address to be monitored.

Worth a look although it doesn’t seem to show upstream traffic rate per device which is what you actually want.

The bandwidth control also would be worth a try.

Re: Odd situation

SteveA — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 15:21:55 GMT

so, my wife has has her laptop powered up for a while, issue has not happened since the last time I posted about it. Line has been up for 6 days 17 hours 31 minutes and has only got a small number of errors which occurred on Thursday night when I was actually surprised the telegraph pole (which is over 100 feet away) didn't fail (given that it's rotten to the core)

	Upstream	Downstream
Current Rate (kbps)	9913	52792
Max Rate (kbps)	9924	53092
SNR Margin (dB)	6.3	3.4
Line Attenuation (dB)	37.3	18.7
Errors (pkts)	27	161

Re: Odd situation

markhawkin — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 19:10:36 GMT

I think it's a matter of keeping an eye on the BQM.

If you see signs of packet loss (which I would interpret as either upstream full or more likely router too busy to respond due to high traffic) I might think about setting some sort of "Quality of Service" in the router.

Generally you do this by getting a "quiet" upstream measurement from Speedtest, taking the figure given and use 90% of this in the upstream traffic policing.

See if that helps with responsiveness under load.

Re: Odd situation

Dan_the_Van — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 08:53:58 GMT

When I used a TP-Link VR400 V3 my understanding of the Error (Pkts) refer to FEC and CRC errors, it is normal to see some. If the rate of change is rapid then this would indicate an issue.

Does the VR600 have telnet access? this command adsl show info at the prompt may reveal more line stats.

There is value in looking at QoS as your upload speed is not that fast.

If you are interested try a bufferbloat test

https://bufferbloat.libreqos.com/ or https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat

As with speed testing this should be used using a wired connection with no other device active.

Re: Odd situation

SteveA — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 15:38:38 GMT

I've saturated the upload and download and they do what you'd expect - the latency increases (i,e. the graph goes blue) but I don't get the packet drop. I've also pushed large amounts of data across the wifi on the router and it doesn't affect the Monitor

Bufferbloat shows this:

Re: Odd situation

Ian06 — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:31:29 GMT

My first suspicion looking at the BQM graphs is that there is some kind of electrical interference impacting you line... it looks from the graphs that something starts around 4:30/5:00pm'ish and last for an hour or so.... If so you might expect the SNR on the line to be impacted.

Is there anything in your house (like central heating/air con) that starts up around then, if not perhaps something in your neighbour's or on the way to the cabinet. Or could it be something in the router that is starting to fail, do you have a backup or another router you could try for a while?

Re: Odd situation

SteveA — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:18:39 GMT

Checked all the obvious things and nothing lines up and as I said restarting the router didn't solve the problem, it would just come back with the same packet loss - I had to actually power it off and back on again and it would go back to zero packet loss - almost as if the router restart didn't disconnect for long enough.

It's stopped doing it , so I suspect I'll never know what it was