High ping and intermittent packet loss

[#1]

Hello everyone,

Ever since last Saturday (12th November), my house has been experiencing issues with our internet. Ping seems to go up and down constantly into the hundreds and on rare occasions into the thousands with packet loss occurring, this makes playing games difficult with lag and disconnects, websites slow to load and difficulties talking to people on skype and teamspeak with constant cut outs and disconnects.

So far, I have tried changing internet channel as well as doing a few hard resets of the router to see if that would fix the problem but unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case.

Also, our living room TV used to be able to use amazon video but as of Saturday, it is no longer able to maintain a connection to the service but I am unsure whether it is related to this issue or is something else all together.

Attached are some of the examples of high ping from the teamspeak server that I connect too (which is based in the UK) as well as trace routes that I have done showing the problem and included below are a few ping test results  

http://www.pingtest.net/result/154970381.png

http://www.pingtest.net/result/154970417.png

http://www.pingtest.net/result/154970322.png

In regards to these pingtest results, I was not able to connect to any UK host at the time of doing the tests, so it connected to the closest one available in Europe.

I am hoping that someone can shed some insight into this issue and I thank you in advance for your help.

Let me know if you need any further information.

EDIT: Removed the client address from the ts screenshots 

[#2]

Seeing as I can't add any more images to my previous post, I will add some more here showing the problem. These images were taken about 3 hours after the original post.

EDIT: Unfortunately, it is still happening today (the day after posting) and after channel hopping a little more and powering off and on the router again, the problem is still around.

Another thing of note is that if I disconnect and connect from the router control panel, the ping seems to stabilise but I won't be able to connect to any website as I am told the DNS server is not responding. My primary DNS server is the router (192.168.1.254) and the alternate DNS server is Google's public DNS (8.8.8.8).

EDIT 2: Below is WINMTR stats when pinging to the plusnet website with 500 packets of data:

WinMTR statistics

Host	%	Sent	Recv	Best	Avrg	Wrst	Last
dsldevice.lan	2	468	460	0	40	936	2
No response from host	100	100	0	0	0	0	0
No response from host	100	100	0	0	0	0	0
be3-3104.psb-ir01.plus.net	0	500	500	6	56	1186	7
sup.pih-gw3.plus.net	0	500	500	6	57	1186	7
ae2.ptw-cr01.plus.net	0	500	500	7	56	1095	8
te9-4.ptn-gw01.plus.net	0	500	500	7	57	1183	8
gi5-1.peh-cr02.plus.net	1	496	495	17	74	1185	18
reth1.peh-elbfw.plus.net	0	500	500	17	68	1188	19
10.104.0.53	0	500	500	17	71	1188	18
portal.plus.net	0	500	500	17	67	1189	22

[#3]

After finding out about the customers being put on new infrastructure and gateways, I have reset the router again this morning and (at least for now) appears to of fixed itself. I will keep monitoring it and update the thread if I continue having issues.

[#4]

Hi James,

The packet loss there seems to be at the router level, resetting this fixed it but please let us know if it comes back.

[#5]

Hi Chris

Thank you for your response.

Unfortunately, it has come back. The main problem not being packet loss (although some is still present), but mainly the wild see saw effect of the ping. I know that ping will go up and down and is never constant, but I would never normally expect it to go above 40 or 50ms.

I have just done a pingplotter test to google and got these results:

As you can see the ping is wildly varying and I will point out that the speed itself appears to be ok, its just the consistency and how it varies wildly, which makes playing games and occasional slow loading of webpages.

Below is the a test to the plusnet website that I did yesterday as well as to my teamspeak server.

This sort of erratic behavior started occurring since last Saturday and up until that point, the connection has been great, it is just the ping that is not. I will mention that our house has the tg582n router with the openreach fibre box, but I can't imagine that would make any difference.

Thank you again for your response and for any more insight you can give as I am starting to run out of ideas.

[#6]

Your router is reporting packet loss. This does not look to be an issue with the Plusnet network. Packets are being dropped between your machine and your router.

If you're connecting wirelessly then I'd try a wired connection. If you're already wired then I'd suggest replacing the ethernet cable.

[#7]

Thank you for your reply,Bob

We tried hooking up via ethernet, but there was still slight packet loss. We've been having signal issues as well so we suspected that there may possibly be a fault with the router anyway (the technicolour 582n, its 3 years old anyway), so we now have a hub one on the way. 

Hopefully that might fix the problem, but it has been a bit better today.

Thank you again for your help.