Switched to a more congested path?

[#1]

At about 4:30 on Friday, my "broadband quality meter" (thinkbroadband BQM) started showing a roughly < 5% "red curtain". 

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/93738b12d8448966f0fc3d2987ff8f8b-15-10-2016.html 

It doesn't hugely impact my use of the internet, but I've never seen this before. Apart from the odd occasion when things have obviously gone badly wrong, there's previously been only a few red dots at the top of the graph when I look closely.  I'm puzzled (in a slightly paranoid way) what the explanation might be.   A bit of congestion somewhere? But it's persistent, and doesn't depend on the time of day.

I'm on a static IP, with no idea whether I'm on "the new network", or how to tell. I'm in Edinburgh, on gateway pcl-bng01, via 

irb.16.pcl-cr02.plus.net . My sync to the cabinet (via dslstats) looks much as usual. I wonder if anyone else has noticed something similar, or can offer some speculations about what might have happened?  

[#2]

Have you tried looking specifically for lost packets with ping test?

I'm on gateway ptn-bng01 and I get this:

It sends you 250 ICMP packets and checks they all arrive.

 This is how I am currently getting routed:

Tracing route to google-public-dns-a.google.com [8.8.8.8]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     3 ms     2 ms     1 ms  dsldevice.lan [192.168.1.254]
  2    24 ms    15 ms    15 ms  lo0.10.central10.ptn-bng01.plus.net [195.166.128.228]
  3    15 ms    16 ms    15 ms  irb.10.PTW-CR02.plus.net [84.93.249.2]
  4    16 ms    17 ms    19 ms  72.14.223.32
  5    16 ms    16 ms    15 ms  64.233.174.113
  6    17 ms    21 ms    18 ms  216.239.57.83
  7    20 ms    18 ms    16 ms  google-public-dns-a.google.com [8.8.8.8]

[#3]

I seem to have exactly the same starting at exactly the same time.

[#4]

Thanks, at least I'm not hallucinating.

I suppose it might be something at thinkbroadband's end. I'll ask there, when I can figure out a question.

@bobminors, I'm reluctant to install java, which I think is necessary for pingtest .

Thanks for the replies.

[#5]

I've seen that before and got round it by gateway hopping.

Link

[#6]

---

@bobminors, I'm reluctant to install java, which I think is necessary for pingtest .

---

Yes, it does use java. I have the java plugin set to only run when I give it permission, but you are quite right to be wary.

Seems like @Browni has the answer

[#7]

Only 5% from about 02:30 on 11th until 15:59 on 14th I had 100% loss - though I was away for that time so didn't really mind! The annoying part is that a long time stable connection via an "ag" gateway is now on a "bng" gateway, so a loss of 2Mb/s down and 200kb/s up - both with the odd spike to "ag" levels.

Phil

[#8]

Hi guys,

At a glance it seems to be something specific to the PCL-BNGXX gateways. We've an internal incident raised to investigate (ref: 95178)

@22over7 wrote:

It doesn't hugely impact my use of the internet...

How is it impacting your use? Can the packet loss be seen if you trace out from your connection? Are you notice a degradation in performance when using any sites/services?

[#9]

No sign of any problems here and I'm currently using pcl-bng02 from a static IP address.

[#10]

@bubpullen, you ask "how *is* it impacting my use"? 

One thing is my wife shouts downstairs that the internet is broken again.  One thing I do is run mtr to www.youtube.com, and then sometimes I see some packet loss, rarely anything more than 10%.  I've just rerun some of the mtr commands I've got in my bash history. There's one funny one: to 213.121.193.164 (which I think is a BT address)  I see a lot of packet loss at my router. Can't remember why I thought that address was interesting.  Quite possibly 213.. doesn't like being mtr'd.

It's very subjective. In the past 2 or 3 weeks I've thought youtube had a lot of latency, and buffered a lot.  Occasionally blogs I visit seemed to hang on initial contact, till I pounded the return key in exasperation. Throughput is OK. Latency has climbed.  No systematic investigation by me.  None of this coincided with last Friday's (4:30pm) appearance of the "red curtain" on TBB's BQM that some of us have remarked on, and is at least objective.

If someone can suggest some well-chosen addresses to run mtr's or traceroutes or pings or suchlike to, I'm happy to oblige.

[#11]

As an addendum to my last reply, maybe (who knows?) the following mtr to TBB's pingbox is interesting:

$ sudo mtr -r -c100 pingbox1.thinkbroadband.com

Start: Mon Oct 17 14:58:43 2016

HOST: dell                        Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev

  1.|-- router                     0.0%   100    1.1   2.1   0.8  13.6   2.5

  2.|-- lo0.16.Central16.pcl-bng0  0.0%   100   17.0  18.8  16.7  49.5   4.3

  3.|-- irb.16.pcl-cr02.plus.net   0.0%   100   17.5  19.8  16.9  92.3   9.1

  4.|-- 195.99.126.98              2.0%   100   18.3  21.2  17.4 111.6  13.2

  5.|-- core4-te0-9-0-21.faraday.  2.0%   100   26.3  19.4  17.6  27.6   2.3

  6.|-- peer1-xe1-0-0.faraday.ukc  2.0%   100   20.1  22.3  18.0  98.4  11.3

  7.|--                       100.0   100    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0

  8.|-- po4-31.core-rs2.thdo.ncuk  7.0%   100   20.3  27.9  18.8 154.7  24.0

  9.|-- pingbox1.thinkbroadband.c  2.0%   100   18.4  20.4  17.7 102.7   9.2

[#12]

Thanks guys, that's helpful.

@22over7, do you see similar to other destinations?

[#13]

Don't know if a counterexample adds anything, but I'm currently on gateway pcl-bng02 and doing a ping to pingbox1.thinkbroadband.com, I get this:

Ping statistics for 80.249.99.164:
    Packets: Sent = 256, Received = 256, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 12ms, Maximum = 23ms, Average = 13ms

Very similar results from 213.121.193.164 :

Ping statistics for 213.121.193.164:
    Packets: Sent = 256, Received = 256, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 12ms, Maximum = 25ms, Average = 12ms

[#14]

@bobpullen: yes.

Here's one to another destination:

$ sudo mtr -r -c100 www.thedailymash.co.uk
Start: Tue Oct 18 11:18:13 2016
HOST: dell                        Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
  1.|-- router                     0.0%   100    0.9   2.6   0.8  57.0   6.2
  2.|-- lo0.16.Central16.pcl-bng0  0.0%   100   17.3  19.6  16.7  76.7   8.3
  3.|-- irb.16.pcl-cr02.plus.net   0.0%   100   17.1  18.9  16.9  83.5   6.8
  4.|-- 195.99.126.98              4.0%   100   18.3  20.5  17.6 102.1   9.5
  5.|-- core4-te0-0-0-21.faraday.  5.0%   100   18.4  19.0  17.3  27.4   2.2
  6.|-- 213.121.193.195            4.0%   100   18.1  19.7  17.5  80.2   6.6
  7.|-- 195.99.126.1               4.0%   100   17.9  19.4  17.6  51.3   3.7
  8.|-- 104.24.17.112              2.0%   100   18.9  20.4  17.7  89.5   9.1

Here's another:

$  sudo mtr -r -c100 www.amazon.co.uk
Start: Tue Oct 18 11:22:47 2016
HOST: dell                        Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
  1.|-- router                     0.0%   100    0.9   2.6   0.8  64.4   7.2
  2.|-- lo0.16.Central16.pcl-bng0  0.0%   100   17.0  18.6  16.7  50.0   4.5
  3.|-- irb.16.pcl-cr01.plus.net   0.0%   100   17.3  18.8  17.0  57.5   4.8
  4.|-- 195.99.126.96              0.0%   100   18.0  19.4  17.5  76.6   6.1
  5.|-- core3-te0-19-0-19.faraday  0.0%   100   18.9  19.0  17.5  36.5   2.3
  6.|-- peer2-et-2-3-0.redbus.ukc  0.0%   100   18.4  19.3  17.3  64.1   5.6
  7.|-- 195.99.126.11              0.0%   100   18.5  19.1  17.4  78.6   6.3
  8.|-- ???                       100.0   100    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0
  9.|-- ???                       100.0   100    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0
 10.|-- 176.32.106.36             47.0%   100   27.2  28.7  27.1  46.9   3.0
 11.|-- 176.32.106.129             0.0%   100   27.6  29.4  27.3  51.3   3.3
 12.|-- 176.32.106.131             0.0%   100   33.5  29.6  27.2  86.3   6.3
 13.|-- ???                       100.0   100    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0

Some other of the "big" sites, like google, bbc etc look clean, but really I've just tried a few at random.

Trying pingbox1.thinkbroadband.com again gives much the same slight loss as yesterday.

[#15]

Another addendum, trying a "straight" ping:

 ping -g1024 -G2048 -h200 -q -c10 pingbox1.thinkbroadband.com 
PING pingbox1.thinkbroadband.com (80.249.99.164): (1024 ... 2048) data bytes

--- pingbox1.thinkbroadband.com ping statistics ---
60 packets transmitted, 27 packets received, 55.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 18.441/20.588/23.073/1.407 ms