Gigafast 900 - Unusable in the evenings

[James3793]

I am wondering if anyone can help me or give me any advice on how to approach VF with my issue.

I have had Gigafast 900 since December last year and its been amazing until recently. I usually get 900 up and down and its been pretty flawless for gaming. 

Last week I noticed something was not right while I was gaming so ran a ping test and found an issue. I am getting around 15ms but every 3 seconds or so, huge spikes of 300-500ms and lots of jitter on the line. I am not getting this issue at all during the day when I am working from home.

Yesterday I noticed I was being routed to Edinburgh which is obviously a little strange, I reset my router and now I am being routed to Birmingham which I thought would fix the issue but tonight, the ping spikes are still going on.

Last night the internet was pretty much unusable.

I ran tracer route and got the following results.

tart: 2023-08-25T01:14:08+0500

HOST: DNSChecker.org                                               Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev

  1.|-- ???                                                          100.0     3    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0

  2.|-- 10.74.194.222                                                 0.0%     3    0.9   7.2   0.9  19.6  10.7

  3.|-- 138.197.248.242                                               0.0%     3    1.2   1.4   1.2   1.7   0.3

  4.|-- 138.197.248.14                                                0.0%     3    0.7   0.9   0.7   1.0   0.2

  5.|-- nyk-b11-link.ip.twelve99.net (62.115.45.5)                    0.0%     3    1.7   1.6   1.5   1.7   0.1

  6.|-- nyk-bb1-link.ip.twelve99.net (62.115.112.68)                  0.0%     3    1.9   1.9   1.7   2.1   0.2

  7.|-- ewr-b3-link.ip.twelve99.net (62.115.140.191)                  0.0%     3    1.9   2.2   1.9   2.5   0.3

  8.|-- cablewireless-ic-379002.ip.twelve99-cust.net (62.115.149.41)  0.0%     3    2.3   2.8   2.3   3.4   0.6

  9.|-- ae3-xcr1.slo.cw.net (195.2.28.170)                            0.0%     3   73.4  73.5  73.4  73.5   0.1

 10.|-- cust-gw-ae15-100-xcr1.slo.cw.net (195.2.2.218)                0.0%     3   74.4  74.5  74.3  74.7   0.2

 11.|-- ???                                                          100.0     3    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0

[James3793]

I started seeing the usual ping spikes around the same time last night, roughly 7.30pm.

I ran PingPlotter for about 20 minutes and recorded a video. Around 3.30 in it seems like there are issues popping up on the timeline but again, I’m not too sure what I’m looking for.

https://youtu.be/WLfsBYm5zuE?si=0OAFIYduw6fV3Z7O

[Ripshod]

There's a lot of packet loss on your link to the router. Are you connected on wifi? If not we can assume twice per second is too frequent and the router is refusing a lot of your pings. Until that is sorted the packet loss for the other hops is likely just part of this. 

The plot shows a little jitter on the net but nothing major. 

[James3793]

I’m connected directly to the router that’s around 5 feet away from my machine. So it’s a router issue?

This is 100% only happening in the evening though. If I tested now, it would be absolutely fine.

[James3793]

Also is it hop 1, READYSHARE you’re looking at? If so, that’s happening now as I’m looking. About 60% packet loss. 

[Ripshod]

READY SHARE is your router, so you're losing a lot of pings between your pc and your router. Test again at 1 second intervals, if you still have that packet loss try 2 seconds.

Test with everything else disconnected and wifi turned off. 

[James3793]

Thanks, will test a report back.

Around a month ago I did remove a dedicated network card from my machine and switched to the motherboard Ethernet socket. I wonder if that’s the issue.

[Ripshod]

Could be. The further tests I suggested should show that. 

[James3793]

Ok, some interesting findings I think.

• The packet loss is only showing at 0.5-second intervals. Not 1 or 2 seconds.
• I added my old network card to my windows PC and tested again but the issue was the same.
• I tested with WI-FI off and the issue was the same.
• I downloaded Pingplotter for my iMac which is also connected directly to the router via a CAT7 cable and got exactly the same results via the iMac

So the issue is with the router I'm guessing? I have a windows laptop I could test from but that might be a waste of time.

[Ripshod]

Did you test at 1 & 2 second intervals?

To be honest let's not worry about that any further. It could be the router's not responding to the pings.

From the graphs we have that show no problem on the internet there's one further course of action before ruling the internet out. Go to https://www.thinkbroadband.com and set up a BQM. You'll need to go into your router's firewall settings and enable icmp pings. 

[James3793]

Done. So do I just leave this for 24 hours and just carry on as normal?