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Big increase in Ping

sleepyjohn
Grafter
Posts: 33
Thanks: 1
Registered: ‎12-03-2013

Big increase in Ping

Hi folks,    I've been on the end of a long slow ADSL line for years,  and have to make the most of download speeds of around 1 to 1.5mbps due to the lack of decent copper pairs to this rural area.   Last year on BTWholesale I was generally measuring pings in the 40 to 60ms region.

I haven't been checking pings for a long time,  but yesterday and today when I measure with the same setup,  I'm now seeing a huge increase in ping times generally to the 1300 to 1400ms region.  

What could have caused this huge increase,  and what can be done about it?

19 REPLIES 19
TheMightyAJ
Plusnet Alumni (retired)
Plusnet Alumni (retired)
Posts: 2,511
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Registered: ‎26-03-2018

Re: Big increase in Ping

Hi @sleepyjohn,

I'm sorry to hear that you've experienced this issue. I've tested your line today and I can see that over the last couple of days the connection has dropped out a few times, which I believe is most likely related to the ping increase that you're reporting.

However, although I can see the connection has dropped out I'm afraid I don't know what's causing it to occur. As this is the case my strongest recommendation at this stage would be to plug the router directly into the test socket in the property if it isn't already setup like that. For reference, we have a guide on how to set the router up within the test socket here. As well as this, I would also recommend going through our online troubleshooting guide, which can be found here.

Please let us know how this goes and whether or not you continue to experience any issues and we'll be happy to pick this back up for further review as soon as possible.

If this post resolved your issue please click the 'This fixed my problem' button
 Alex H
 Plusnet Help Team
sleepyjohn
Grafter
Posts: 33
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Registered: ‎12-03-2013

Re: Big increase in Ping

Your response much appreciated, Alex.    Thanks.

I must admit to having disconnected my "Plusnet Router" several times over the last 24hrs to try it in some different locations via a longer extension cable,  so that certainly accounts for the "dropouts" you've observed.   Mea culpa!

I've now restored it to it's original setup on the short supplied cable plugged directly into the test socket,  and with the router showing an uptime of 8hrs,  I'm seeing a BTWholesale ping of 1365.     I'll leave it like this for another day or two and watch what happens to the ping readings.

I've been through "Broadband problems and how to fix them".  What I haven't tried so far is changing to a different ADSL filter as this would interrupt the ping observations I'm running.   Nor do I have access to a spare router to try that,  but I'll report back with more ping results in another day or two.

 

HarryB
Plusnet Help Team
Plusnet Help Team
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Registered: ‎25-03-2015

Re: Big increase in Ping

Thanks @sleepyjohn, let us know how you get on with that.

If this post resolved your issue please click the 'This fixed my problem' button
 Harry Beesley
 Plusnet
sleepyjohn
Grafter
Posts: 33
Thanks: 1
Registered: ‎12-03-2013

Re: Big increase in Ping

Hi again folks,

      Well I've now let my router run undisturbed for a couple of days,  and been measuring speeds and pings in the meantime.

Originally tried to attach results as "pings.xlsx" (which also includes old results I recorded last year),  but .xlsx failed so I'm trying it again as "pings.csv".     Hope you find it's still readable as a .csv!   

It's clear enough to see how speeds have stabilised themselves after about 1 day uptime,  but with one or two exceptions I'm seeing pings consistently running at over 20 times the delays I measured last year.

I do experience a few annoying dropouts from time to time,  but don't find that excessive;  it's probably due to occasional error peaks on my long old copper pair to the DSLAM , and to normal network congestion. I can't  see any correlation with my long pings..  

So back to my original question:  What could have caused this huge increase in ping time,  and what can be done about it?

 

SammyM
Plusnet Help Team
Plusnet Help Team
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Registered: ‎22-01-2018

Re: Big increase in Ping

Hello @sleepyjohn,

 

Thanks for getting back to us, we are happy to hear that your connection has return to where it should be. Unfortunately as the issue is no longer present we wouldn't be able to determine the cause I am afraid as it could be numerous of different things.

 

Please get back to us if you have any further problems. 

If this post resolved your issue please click the 'This fixed my problem' button
 Sammy M - Sheffield Team
 Plusnet Help Team
sleepyjohn
Grafter
Posts: 33
Thanks: 1
Registered: ‎12-03-2013

Re: Big increase in Ping

Hello Sammy,  but no,  that's not correct.   My huge ping discrepancy hasn't disappeared at all.  As I hope you can see from the "Pings.csv" file I attached last time, they are still consistently running at around 20 times my measurements last year.   I've just  checked  again this morning and seen 1381ms.

So we come back to my original question:  What could be causing this and what can we do about it.  

  Thanks,    +   John

 

Gandalf
Community Gaffer
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Registered: ‎21-04-2017

Re: Big increase in Ping

Hi John.

Thanks for getting back to us.

Our tests aren't showing any causes for the increase in latency.

Are you seeing any real world issues as a result of this for example problems gaming etc?

We're also aware that the BTwholesale speedtester can provide unreliable results upon occasion, so to compare can you run a test at http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest please?

From 31st October 2022, I no longer have a regular presence here as I’ve moved on to a new role.
Anoush Mortazavi
Plusnet
aesmith
Pro
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Registered: ‎26-09-2015

Re: Big increase in Ping

Are you sure you don't have anything uploading, Google Drive synch or Icloud photo backup etc?  It doesn't take much to max out the upload on ADSL and with some low end routers that causes huge increases in latency.   

Jubby
All Star
Posts: 626
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Registered: ‎06-08-2018

Re: Big increase in Ping

Hello @sleepyjohn,

After retesting the line, your connection had a low meantime between errors. I have increased the SNR margin to match the length of the line and when retesting 15 minutes later, no errored seconds appeared. It's too early to tell if the meantime between errors has increase but if you could continue to monitor the service and let us know if there is any improvement in latency.

 

Your up and downstream aren't being maxed out from the data sample I have looked at, so it doesn't appear to be this that is causing the increase in latency. I would also recommend cross referencing the speed tests from BT Wholesale and Thinkbroadband as @Gandalf has advised. 

Thank you

If this post resolved your issue please click the 'This fixed my problem' button
 Lewis G
 Infrastructure Operations Professional
sleepyjohn
Grafter
Posts: 33
Thanks: 1
Registered: ‎12-03-2013

Re: Big increase in Ping

Thanks.    Sorry I haven't been able to give this outstanding ping issue much attention over the last few days,  but last Friday, as you'd suggested,  I did try comparing my speed on thinkbroadband with that on BTWholesale.    Both showed similar speeds but they both gave results that were below half of those I'd been measuring on previous days.   Meanwhile BTWholesale's ping remained consistently high in the 1300ms region.

Over the weekend, I've been noticing some slow connections and holes in speech.   I don't do any gaming.   

Today,  speeds I've checked on thinkbroadband and BTWholesale still roughly match and are roughly back to the figures I sent on here last week in "pings.csv".  BTWholesale continues to show a ping in the 1300ms region.    thinkbroadband doesn't seem to show a ping figure,  so I can't compare.

I think I'd better do some more monitoring and compare BTWholesale up and down speeds with thinkbroadband's,  but this isn't really addressing the big increase in ping times (around 20x longer) I've been measuring this year compared to last year.

Might it perhaps help if I run some ping tests direct from my laptop's terminal instead of from speedtest sites?   I so, what IP address or addresses should I ping to?

     Regards,     +   John

sleepyjohn
Grafter
Posts: 33
Thanks: 1
Registered: ‎12-03-2013

Re: Big increase in Ping

I'm a little confused!    Does "latency" mean the same as ping ms ?    I understand a ping figure to be the time it takes for a small locally generated packet to go and come back from a specified IP address,  including not only the go and return path delays but also the distant server response time.    Is "latency" exactly the same?

Anonymous
Not applicable

Re: Big increase in Ping

@sleepyjohn You could use :

pingbox1.thinkbroadband.com
or
80.249.99.164
BD
Plusnet Alumni (retired)
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Posts: 1,359
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Registered: ‎24-04-2017

Re: Big increase in Ping

Hi @sleepyjohn, as @Anonymous advised we usually suggest pingbox1.thinkbroadband.com in regards to pings and trace routes. As you are trying to capture a high latency/ping issue occurring, rather than just pinging addresses I'd suggest perhaps running a trace route to addresses instead (tracert command) as this will give a more detailed version of how long a packet takes to go through your network, ours, our suppliers then onto the destination and network of that you are pinging. This hopefully should give us a more detailed view of where the issue may be caused if the high ms is in a constant location in the hops. Usually hops 1-7 or so are our and our suppliers and anything there after the destination and please don't be alarmed if you see hopes 2/3 or 6/7 time out as this is a normal occurrence. Just to make sure also as I can't see any mentioned of this prior, when running the trace routes or ping tests we'd recommend solely using a wired connection as wireless it's self could be behind the latency/ping issue if this is what has been used prior. Please let us know how it goes and if there's any spikes in ms that stand out please do send us a print screen/capture of the trace route.

sleepyjohn
Grafter
Posts: 33
Thanks: 1
Registered: ‎12-03-2013

Re: Big increase in Ping

Many thanks for replies and suggestions.   Sorry for my slow reply;  on my side I haven't been able to give this all the attention it deserves,  but I can now submit a few new results.

 

First there's "Results.csv" which is my summary comparing results from BTWholesale,  Think Broadband's website,  and one tracert test.   You'll notice that I'm continuing to consistently see a huge difference between BTWholesale's ping results and the others.    Does this mean that BTWholesale's ping figures are so wrong they should be totally ignored??   I still remain quite perplexed by this.discrepancy.

 

Then I'm attaching one tracert result in "tracert.csv".  I should point out that I've obtained this with Ubuntu's "mtr" facility,  not Window's tracert,   but hopefully you'll find this sufficiently similar and self explanatory to relate it to what tracert would have shown.     mtr did 5 tests over 9 hops giving an overall ping average of 40.3.  The only question from this is why the result is so vastly different to BTWholesale's

 

I haven't been using my broadband very much in the last few days, so can't comment on subjective speeds or holes in speech just recently.  My plan is to do more monitoring and see whether the slow performance and holes in speech I was seeing last week are still causing a problem.   I'll perhaps try for some more tracert-like results with "mtr".

 

In the meantime, I'd find it helpful if you could say exactly what changes you've made to my system since we started this thread.

 

    Thanks again & best regards,      +   John