Evening disruptions
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Evening disruptions
15-02-2013 10:32 PM
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I did have some issues a few weeks ago but I made some intensive changes, including replacing the router and rewiring the extension sockets in the house and replacing the cabling with new CW1308 cable. I have also unplugged my Sky boxes and only my telephone and router are connected to a single extension socket in the house. For a while all seemed good but the last coupe of days have been interesting, to say the least.
Thursday lunchtime:
Bt Speedtest brought the following results:
"The Performance Tester is currently unable to run a speed test for your broadband connection. Please try again shortly, however if this problem persists, raise the issue with your service provider."
I posted on the high latency thread and at least one other user had the same issue with the BT Speedtest site at the same time as me.
Then Thursday evening:
The TBB graph entitled "Thursday evening" shows a 24hr period where everything goes slightly haywire, while the Friday evening graph shows the current results after I manually disconnected and changed to a different gateway. From an amateur perspective it looks like it's not down to the gateway as I'm getting poor results from more than one. The wiring's all new so hoping it's not down to that. Outside these times everything runs very smoothly and trouble free, so the problem is intermittent at best.
I'm on 20CN ADSL with an IP Profile of 7.15Mbps and I'm usually close to that speed. Generally happy with the speed apart from the occasional problems as outlined above. I've attached latest Routerstats SNRM graph. Any help or ideas gratefully received
Re: Evening disruptions
15-02-2013 10:45 PM
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Well the Bits/Tone plot doesn't show any immediate concerns, could you post the DS Noise Margin plot?
Are you able to say what usage your connection was getting between just after 12pm to around 7pm today?
Re: Evening disruptions
16-02-2013 9:02 AM
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attached the DS Noise margin plot. I was out for a while today but the kids were home so I would guess and say a mixture of film streaming, gaming and facebook
Re: Evening disruptions
16-02-2013 9:22 AM
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Re: Evening disruptions
16-02-2013 10:50 AM
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Edit: what sampling rate are you using on RouterStats and is that the Netgear at the moment?
Re: Evening disruptions
16-02-2013 10:52 AM
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Re: Evening disruptions
16-02-2013 11:13 AM
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The problem with a lot of streaming services is they are using more and more bandwidth - particularly for HD. Two people using iPlayer watching HD streams at the same time would pretty much use all of your connection speed. Things like browsing/Skype would probably slow down as a result.
Re: Evening disruptions
16-02-2013 11:20 AM
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I get what you're saying but then shouldn't I see the same issues every time they e.g. stream? I'm confused partly because the blips in connection don't always coincide with usage. Sometimes when they are streaming and on facebook I can Skype with no issues, other times no-one is using it and Skype audio is awful. I've tried getting them to e.g. stop downloading at the time but there seems to be no noticeable impact upon perfomance
Re: Evening disruptions
16-02-2013 11:40 AM
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It's a shame your router doesn't have some form of traffic monitor so you can see what is going through when you are having problems. Which technicolor router do you have?
Re: Evening disruptions
16-02-2013 11:50 AM
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Re: Evening disruptions
16-02-2013 12:12 PM
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I'm guessing at the moment that you might have been seeing a combination of Plusnet's network problem combined with a maxing out of your own connection in some circumstances, so AndyH's suggestion would be a good idea but the peak times might also be peak times of your usage!
If you look at your TBB graphs, they are nice a low and flat with no yellow or blue peaks during obvious quiet times (eg. middle of the night) and at non-peak usage Pingtest is returning excellent figures.
Once you connection starts getting usage, and the more intensive the usage, the greater the yellow peaks and spikes.
Audio on Skype doesn't use a lot of bandwidth, so that by itself, I wouldn't expect to have much impact on a TBB plot.
When you are Streaming, the bulk of the traffic is downstream and if there is other heavy usage on the connection, I'd expect to see some yellow peaks.
Now, I'm not a Gamer, but if I'm not mistaken there is generally a lot more Upstream traffic in Gaming, so if there were say a couple of games going on and especially if you were hosting, then with a 448kbps upstream connection it wouldn't surprise me if that easily got maxed out. That's when I'd expect to see large blue peaks and blocks of increased average latency.
One other thing with streaming, I've always noticed Youtube stuff is never as good as the BBC from the point of view of buffering or sound synced with video, and that has from time to time been dependant of the version of Flash at the time (ie some versions have been worse/better than others). I've not investigated any issues with my own computer that may contribute to that, I expect there's a few!
Re: Evening disruptions
17-02-2013 8:42 AM
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My exchange is good old fashioned 20CN with no plans for 21CN and the word "fibre" isn't even in the local dictionary, as far as I can tell.
The reason for my concerns is that I never used to get the Skype issues before PN, but on the other hand my connection used to be a lot slower so my son didn't bother so much with streaming either (due to buffering every 20 seconds or so), so the two probably cancel each other out. As mentioned the only thing that still puzzles me a bit is that it's not as simple as "streaming=poor Skype", as sometimes it has no adverse effect at all. Occasionally I have various people in the house streaming, on Facebook and Skype, all at the same time, while gaming runs fine. Other times nothing seems to work well
What you say makes sense but I'm pretty sure I was getting some blue peaks when I could have sworn that no-one was using the line beyond mobile usage, and does that really use a lot? I could be wrong there, though, and will have to monitor more vigilantly. I do notice that Xbox Live often has moderate NAT in the evening and rarely, if ever, during the day, but my son streams at all hours so don't quite see the correlation there. Possibly that's down to PN network as you have suggested.
Anyway I'm generally happy with the service but it does seem odd that the issues don't happen every day, while my son is a creature of habit and usually visits the same sites so I would have expected things to be consistent in that respect. I may be getting greedy but just looking for perfection
Thanks again both for your help.
Re: Evening disruptions
18-02-2013 12:25 AM
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FYI I've experienced an occasional problem with poor Skype on 20CN, but it's usually only sporadic and not persistent and every time I check it's still been given the correct prioritisation!
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