Packet Loss

[#1]

My broadband technical knowledge is somewhat limited so I hope these questions are not too silly.
My broadband is provided via Pn ' Fibre to the Cabinet' and my laptop is wireless connected.
I occasionally run JDs Auto Speed Tester. It normally shows a download speed of around 33/34 Mb/s and an upload speed of 1.74 or thereabouts.  So far so good.
However, Ping is shown to be 8 or 9ms and Packet Loss measures around 52%.
The  small amount of information I have read seems to indicate that the Packet Loss is high. I do not notice any particular problems when I use BBC iPlayer or You Tube etc.
My questions are (a) Is 52% likely to be accurate and, if so, is it unacceptably high. (b) If the answers to (a) are yes and yes what can I do about it, if anything. (c) What are the signs of high Packet Loss.

[#2]

The reported packet loss doesn't sound accurate, assuming you're on PlusNet's standard 'up to 40Mb/s' FTTC which is consistent with your upload spped of 1.74, a packet loss of over 50% would be expected to give a download throughput of less than 20Mb/s.
Please try opening a command prompt and typing 'ping -n10 bbc.co.uk' and see what that gives for packet loss.
(I have never had a problem with JDAST, I think it's an excellent little program but I suspect it's misreporting in this case)

[#3]

walker23
Thank you for your helpful reply.  I tried the command you suggested but  -n10 was out of range it said. However, I entered simply 'ping bbc.co.uk' and the result came back as:
ping statistics for 212.58.241.131
Packets  Sent = 4            Received =4  Lost = 0 (0%)
approx. round trip times
Minimum = 8ms    Maximum = 9ms      Average = 8ms
The round trip times are what I get on JDs A.S.Tester.
I guess therefore that the reported packet loss of 50+%  on JD is an aberration as you thought.
Thanks again

[#4]

Quote from: trymyluck

-n10 was out of range

You need a space, so command should be

ping -n 10 www.bbc.co.uk

[#5]

A packet loss of 50% is actually likely to produce speed results of less than 20Mbps on a 40Mbps service, and I am not referring to direct speedtests, which may perform other things to calculate throughout (like JDs Auto Speedtest does, though system hooks).
50% of a 40Mbps TCP stream load, will require retransmissions. Some of a retransmissions will also be lost too given such a high volume. The overall throughput thus has significant impact.
This all said, I do not think you have anything to worry about and may find it better to submit a bug report on the test tool (I will point them in the direction of this thread over on the SY DigitalRegion forum).
I say this, as one very key thing you have not reported here is that you are seeing any other problems. With 50% packet loss in the real world, trust me, you would be complaining of a lot lot more than the result of that test

[#6]

Quote from: Jaggies

You need a space, so command should be ping -n 10 www.bbc.co.uk