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

[Ripshod]

Yep, just do what you do. Check it after 2 hours to make sure it's not solid red.

See how it goes

[James3793]

Thanks so much, I will keep an eye on it and send something across later tonight.

I really do appreciate all your help with this.  

[James3793]

So I ran the broadband quality monitor test for most of the day yesterday and all evening. Sure enough, the disruption was right on schedule and shows up nicely in the graph. Gaming was more or less impossible during this time and other services in the house were all effected.

Not sure if this is how I share the graph with you?

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality/share/c88bb7edecb0f303ca31cd151dff90cd19bcfeee

[Ripshod]

Yep, that's showing significant packet loss at the relevant time. Latency is great though. With congestion/contention I'd expect the latency to rise too. 

This is clearly a network issue and now you have evidence, so raise this with vodafone.

https://vodafone.co.uk/bbservcd 

[James3793]

Great,

I guess I should really test this with the Vodafone router that's on its way to me as that's going to be the first thing they ask?

[Ripshod]

Would make sense to run the BQM again with the vodafone router before raising the issue with them. I forgot you were using the netgear 😳

[James3793]

Roger that.

One last question, the issue is obviously happening out of the Vodafone support hours, if I speak to them in the day and they run tests, they likely won't see any issues.

Any suggestions on this?

[Ripshod]

I have feeling, after reading about similar problems with the RAX70 that the vf router may just sort the problem out. Google is your friend.

Once (if) this gets raised to tech1 then they have full access to all the tools needed to run a 24hr or 7day trace on your connection. They (and CS) will have direct access to the vf router, it's configuration and debug logs.

Just keep the BQM running constantly to gather your own evidence and strengthen your case. 

[James3793]

Thanks again for all the help on this, I will keep you posted.

[James3793]

I am still waiting on the VF router to be delivered so I can test with that.

I did keep the BQ test running and got the same results for 3 nights in a row at the exact same time. Yesterday I did roll back my firmware to 12.114 which was released in December 2022 I believe, the issue is still there but nowhere near as dramatic as on the latest drivers. I will still get the big ping spikes though.

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality/share/621d5d919b4d74ee7a8e0f3ef1f238ab803a6763