New to Fibre, first in my area, small bursts of packet loss weekday mornings only

[#1]

The Hub 2 (by the standards of an ISP supplied, "mass market" router) is adequate for many purposes.Loads of Plusnet customers will use it including those regularly working from home. The Openreach provided Full Fibre connectivity is also used by many via multiple BT Group and non-BT Group ISPs and generally works well.

The Hub 2 is based on an older BT router (with a Plusnet branded firmware skin) and isn't known to have packet loss problems.

To progress this problem to a resolution you need an Openreach visit and a "clueful" engineer to test the connection. This can be a bit of a gamble as your problem, while real, is unusual.

In the past I've occasionally had interactions where they put what I would call the "more experienced" staff on a piece of work. How you get such a person is a bit of a mystery but complaining about the install to Openreach might trigger a visit from such a person.

The only thing you can do by spending money is get an alternative router.

In your position I would get a "gaming router" or similar which allows Quality of Service (QoS) to be set, rate limit the upstream to 80% of what you measure on a the Ookla Speedtest.

It may or may not help but it won't do any harm and it should remove the quality of the router from the discussion.

If the new "gaming" router doesn't solve your problem then it's plugging away at the fault line of attack.

[#2]

Morning @iZian 

The Hub two is currently the only Hub plusnet supply for Part and Full Fibre connections, the WAN port being 1000Mbps has no issues when used for the high speed Full Fibre connection of 900Mbps. However being only a WiFi 5 device, wireless connections would be up to 500Mbps due to hardware restrictions. For your 300 Mbps then the Hub two should be fine.

I have looked at your BQM this morning and noted the packet drops over night, was anyone using your internet connection?

A busy Hub could cause the drops as seen on the BQM graph, with ping requests being missed by a router having something better to do. Is the mtr output still showing no packet loss for 192.168.1.254? 

Are there any cloud backups or downloads occurring overnight? Are you only connecting to the Hub?

If you are not happy with the service you are receiving then I would raise a complaint

https://www.plus.net/help/legal/complaints-code-of-practice/ 

@MisterW  Enabling the account based firewall with the associated network changes has not helped, I'm not convinced plusnet support will not look at packet loss on WAN side of the Hub? Someone from support should be checking the local ONT for errors and light signal quality.

[#3]

@Dan_the_Van I really dont know what level of diagnostics first-line support have access to ?

I suspect its quite limited, they will be able to see connection drops and SHOULD (I think?) be able to run speed tests to the ONT but I suspect that's about all. Anything more will probably need an Openreach visit. The problem is getting support to acknowledge the problem and then getting an Openreach engineer who also understands it!

Before going down the complaint route, I'm going to try escalating this thread and tagging Bob & Dave to see if they have any thoughts... 

[#4]

@Dan_the_Van The red spikes overnight are a mystery. I can’t see anything would have been using much of anything overnight especially not for 2 full hours. 

the Xbox were both connected back up yesterday and we used them in the evening. At 2am they wake up for updates since they’re in eco mode. 
But; Xbox also keeps detailed stats of network activity by hour. One used 10MB and one used 2.5MB so 12 total. They go back to power off after seeing no updates after 10 minutes. Or 5. 
All laptops powered down. iPhones backup but their backups take under 1 minute and usually have a bigger yellow spike if there was anything meaningful. 

Just after 7 this morning the red spike tallies with wife waking up early. But her devices go with her to work so can’t account for red in the daytime she isn’t home. But she woke up, used her phone and then went and was doing her same stuff for 2 hours now, adding more her then putting steaming on at 8 and me browsing forums since 8 searching for answers. 

I apologise I’ve not got round to testing new electricity. I’m going to BQ today and get a 15m extension to run from the other ring in case my electricity is foul. 

I am today back up to “all” devices reconnected. Since about 8 again I re enabled security cameras HomeKit cloud and hubs and smart watches and an oven all back on. No red spikes. Front camera uploads a clip every time a cat walks by. 20 so far. No red line. 

I still can’t seem to get a red line by doing downloads or uploads or streaming TV. It seems out of my control. 

I have not yet called Plusnet again, I’ll hear out more advice I think. The person I got 2 calls ago removed the wrong router from the”stuff” and then I saw TR69 failures to “ceased.x.x” right away. He admitted nothing and I needed a factory reset. The last one acknowledged Ethernet was in use but sent me a guide on WiFi extenders and signal. I appreciate they might only have so much resources so I didn’t want to complain as such because that’s not me. I don’t like confrontations. 

I wonder seeing other people some have said BT wholesale can have issues and even if you have ISP support and openreach you can still encounter an issue. Others I saw say openreach can switch you to a different something… I lost the link sorry. Some place the fibre went to I think. 

Again thank you all so much. Probably get tired of me saying that soon but I mean it

I just thought; my Xbox didn’t do much at 2am. But hundreds of other Xboxes might have. 2am is the hard coded time for eco to check updates. 

[#5]

@iZian 

@Dan_the_Van wrote:

I have looked at your BQM this morning and noted the packet drops over night, was anyone using your internet connection?

Are there any cloud backups or downloads occurring overnight? Are you only connecting to the Hub?

Just another random thought to check out (which you may already have done).

Have you looked at My devices on the Hub 2 to check connected devices? Listed devices with previous connections to the Hub 2 persist even if not connected, unless actively removed. You could have a look to see if there is anything you don't recognise or that shouldn't be there.

[#6]

@pvmb Yep; thanks to remind but yeah every device is accounted for. I went and named the obscure ones like the oven. And each Apple device is accounted for by their MAC address. Connected and unconnected each one is valid. I never even leave WPS enabled…

[#7]

@iZian 

I would go down the OR Complaint route before considering spendig money. Neither might solve the problem but doing the one that costs nothing is the better option.

I would submit the OR Complaint today - you lose absolutely nothing by doing so.

Brian

[#8]

@MisterW  I just saw your reply; I appreciate any help from anyone who has the resources and time to. 
Im going to go to BQ today and get an extension power lead to try change the electricity this afternoon and rule that out too. 
thank you

[#9]

@bmc 

There is a superuser escalation for this issue now, probably best to hold back form any formal complaints to plusnet or Openreach.

Duplicate efforts for an issue should be avoided.

[#10]

@Dan_the_Van  My thoughts also. I don’t want to make any calls and have anyone working at the opposite end of anything. 

im out right now. Road trip and B&Q for the cable. I can see I’ve had red dips whilst I’ve been out. 

One thing I don’t mind trying again is moving all my devices back to the old hub 2 and leaving them offline and disabling WiFi on the new hub 2 just to prove that this can happen with zero devices connected. I could try set that up tonight or tomorrow. I’d have to download some offline content to watch first but not a problem. 

Thanks from sunny Stroud today. 

[#11]

@Dan_the_Van just a small update from me  

So I did another experiment today. Replaced more things. And I tried taking devices off network. 

The BQM shows a spike at 1:38pm today and this spike is interesting because:

I have zero devices on the network. I set up the old hub 2 in another room without internet and changed the WiFi on the new one; and moved the Ethernet devices. 

So at 1:38pm when there was a red spike then; I had no devices on network. None WiFi none Ethernet. Nothing. 

the spike before that I still had an Xbox on the network nothing else. The spike before that was no Xbox but still a Philips hue bridge on Ethernet port 1. 

I hope this rules out my usage or devices as cause. I’m afraid I didn’t get to swapping the electricity over. I could try that tonight. 
but I’m going to get my house back online again now 

Hope everyone’s Sunday is well. 

[#12]

Just another update if it was warranted; I tried leaving as much offline as I could but no avail. Sometimes it feels like the more I use the connection the worse it gets though. Like any uploading at all even for playing a game or streaming my camera.

last night I tried to play a bit of multiplayer on console and it was terrible. I mean, it was fine a lot of the time and then just like I’d totally been disconnected and nothing was moving. 

today I just had 2 big lockouts of video and audio in my team meet. So not great but not the worst. 

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality/share/682e35d655f43e4468781e9e53574931c7...

I’m not sure if there are more suggestions I can follow at all. I was not sure if I was waiting to hear back at all or what I should do or try next. 
It sounded like someone might have been taking a look but I didn’t want to presume, I wasn’t sure what an escalation was and if I needed to do something for it or phone up. 

Thank you all again

[#13]

@iZian I'm afraid my escalation didnt produce any results so I would suggest going down the complaint route.

[#14]

@MisterW  Oh that’s sad to hear. 

I was thinking I should contact PlusNet again but I want sure if there was any advice on how to get them to escalate the issue beyond sending me info on WiFi signal. 
Perhaps getting hold of someone interested in the monitor graphs or the pictures of the fibre 

I’ll also just drop one last mention for @Dan_the_Van for any advice. But I think I’m stuck with this connection now I’m in contact. But there’s no alternative to OpenReach really. 

Thank you all for spending time on this

[#15]

@iZian 

Perhaps getting hold of someone interested in the monitor graphs

That's exactly what I was hoping for by the escalation but it looks like the people I tagged are not available at the moment. I doubt if any first line support would understand the graphs but maybe its worth a try.