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

[#1]

@iZian 

I would get a complaint raised with plusnet, they should be left to contact Openreach regarding the full fibre connection.

It is interesting even with just a router connected to the ONT with no devices, packets are being dropped.

Support need to focus beyond this being a WiFi issue.

[#2]

@Dan_the_Van  @MisterW 
Thanks both. 
I have an OpenReach appointment for tomorrow via PlusNet. I managed to get someone on the phone who used my camera to look at my cable and so they’ll send someone to assess the cable and ONT perhaps. 

Please keep fingers crossed for me. I think I need all the luck I can get. 
thank you, 

[#3]

@iZian we'll keep everything crossed.

Let us know how the visit goes...

[#4]

@MisterW  He checked all the fibre and had good light and changed a splice 

But unless I see, or claim to, an orange or red light or something then it won’t let him change the ONT. 

He left; 15 mins later I had my first packet loss burst. I can’t run to see the lights so it’s going to be dashcam or something. 

I’ll see how it goes tomorrow and if it’s no better I’ll call up PN again and see what they say about this ONT. 

The engineer lives local to me so knew the layout of my house he has one the same. Was a good guy. Wouldn’t let him push the swap ONT button because it didn’t appear for the call-out. 

But at this rate I’m not even sure, reading about it, if it’s not just some over subscribed area I’m in and something is dropping packets at times to cope, but my packets aren’t valuable enough to keep. I’m not clued up on the tech though. 

so summary; changed some splice but light was just as nice; and I think I’m just going to have to live with this, or set up a dashcam to get the ONT replaced but even then that might not fix it. 

[#5]

Just a small update; OpenReach came out again and swapped the ONT for a different model.

Since the swap I’ve noticed 2 things:

1: my upload speed seems to be about 5-10% lower and capped at like 47.7 whereas before I had 48-52. (Incidentally 47.7 is almost exactly 95% of the upload capacity; something I read can help with things but that’s from a distant memory)

2: when testing my upload, instead of a peak latency of 1000-2000+ and average latency of 450-500; I now have a peak latency closer to 300-400 and an average latency of about 120.

Idle latency and download unchanged at all.

Note that after replacement the first test he did failed due to a profile not set or profile not matching I don’t know.

I’ve just had this done so; I’ll touch wood and cross my toes. I’ve only had 1 packet loss on BQM when I was doing a speed test which I don’t worry about.

I really want to be hopeful. But; what are the chances it was the brand of ONT? Or the actual ONT? Or something wasn’t set up correctly on the old ONT?
I really hope this is the end of my thread.

I have a second fibre install coming up at parents property and it will be nagging me which ONT they get.

I’ll come back with an update very soon if this didn’t fix the issue and I’ll try buying an ASUS router next. Or I’ll come back in a few days if this did solve things.

[#6]

Small update: I don’t know what’s normal. At 4:40am and 30 seconds the hub logs that the connection dropped completely.
At 4:48am and 29 seconds; 1 second sort of 9 minutes: it reconnected.

I don’t know if that’s some line test something was running or what. But 10 minutes almost to the second makes me think it was something not random.

I’ll continue hue monitoring but so far I’ve not experienced any packet loss bursts on this different brand of ONT.

[#7]

It's impossible to prove but my guess is that whatever the profile change that was done as part of the ONT swap fixed it.

Your overnight drop sounds like a bit of Openreach planned work in the wider network (perhaps patching devices) and I don't think this directly relates to your connection.

Keep the Think Broadband monitoring going but hopefully your connection will now be up to the standards of other Plusnet FTTP connections (from my experience very good).

[#8]

@markhawkin Thanks; yeah my hope is that it was just a coincidence or a firmware update of the ONT. weird it was exactly 9 minutes and that figure reminded me of something but  I’m probably imagining a memory.

I really hope it was just coincidence though. 

and my worry is that it was a profile thing… seeing that I’m limited to 48mbps now and I was worried that could change back but… again fingers crossed. I want to see a stable connection for 72 hours then I’ll be probably able to sleep better. 

The positive evidence is my speed test history that showed on day 1 of my FTTP my upload ping was average 400+ and now it’s consistently average 100-130. 

if it was a profile; 3 engineer visits, 1 home hub, 2 power cables, 2 Ethernet cables, an Ethernet dongle, 1 ONT, and a “splice” of fibre were “wasted” in the diagnosis of something I would have thought someone could have pushed a button to reset. 
That being said; I don’t know enough to know if that’s true. I’m not angry. More exhausted. And anxious about the FTTP install at mother dearest’s house on Thursday. 

thank you and you all again for reading along on this journey. 

if it’s stable in a few days I’ll report back. Hopefully nobody will hear from me until then because hopefully it’s stable and no more 9 minute disconnects or plagues of locust. 

[#9 · Accepted solution]

So I’ve now had a stable connection for a few days.

The solution was to have the ONT replaced.

3 things happened. The ONT was replaced. With a different model. And the line was re-provisioned and speed is now 48 not 50.

I don’t know which solved it, whether the Zyxel branded ONT is just a bad design, or if it was broken, or just something up with the setup. But it was a financial and resource burden replacing everything to get to that point.
The Adtran ONT is performing flawlessly on this connection.
My ping is lower by 60% and no packet loss bursts.

It was difficult to get the ONT to be replaced. Both OR engineers said the job wasn’t raised in a way that allowed replacement but the second engineer phoned HQ and made it happen for me.

I thank god for him. Or I’d still have packet loss and broken meetings all day.

Thank you all for your time.

In the end it has left me with shame that I had to lie to someone to get this resolved. But needs must. It had been a month of pulling hair out. I am sorry.

[#10]

@iZian Good to hear the problem has been solved and you can now relax and just get on with things.

"The Adtran ONT is performing flawlessly on this connection."

My ONT appears to be an Openreach branded Adtran SDX 611 

[#11]

@pvmb Yeah I was given the slightly newer 601Q

Don’t ask me why 600 series newer than 610 series.