High Packet Loss in the Evening Only

[dncan29]

I've been having periodic packet loss for the last month or so at very specific times in the evening, and am at a bit of a loss on what to do.

To start off I'll explain that I live in a remote area, so I use a mobile SIM in a TP-Link router for household internet. The phone mast is quite literally at the bottom of the garden, so I've always had a very strong signal and quite fast speeds - enough for gaming and streaming simultaneously. I also have a number of smart devices around my home, including several Google Home devices and smart switches. Never had any issues in nearly 2 years with this setup.

Beginning at the start of December 2022, I noticed that I was getting very high packet loss (up to 30%, with higher spikes) while playing online. At these times my wife also noticed that YouTube, Netflix and iPlayer were buffering regularly or playing at low quality. We assumed at first that it would just be a temporary glitch, and left it at that.

After a few more nights I started investigating further. To start off I tried disconnecting our wifi boosters - no change. Resetting the router - no change. Comparing wired (PC) and wireless connections no  difference. After resetting everything and even trying the hotspot on my phone, I gave up. Give it a couple of weeks, I thought. It's the Christmas holidays, maybe the lines are just busier than usual.

Come January and with no further change, I used pingplotter to test our connection over a few days and the results have been quite interesting:

This is an example taken over a 48 hour period. My latency (black line) is very stable. The red bars show packet loss. What's interesting here is that every day, at 15:00 on the dot, the packet loss starts to rise. It peaks and drops again at 19:00, then rises sharply throughout the evening before tailing back to zero at 23:00.

This cycle repeats every day, without fail, near enough to the minute. And it's exactly the same whether I'm on a wired or wireless connection, and is also the same using the hotspot on my phone (and we've tried this with 2 different Vodafone SIMs).

Surely this must be some technical glitch on Vodafone's end? As I mentioned it only started beginning of December 2022, but the connection is unusable for gaming in the evening and streaming is also slow.

Is there anything more that can be done?

Thanks for any help

[Lynxthecat]

I can confirm that our business is also experiencing immense packet loss (circa 25% rendering Microsoft Teams calls unusable) that started a few months ago - 4G connection using business/commercial grade outdoor router NR7101 with line of sight to the tower and very strong LTE stats and circa 65Mbit/s download / 25Mbit/s upload. This is most definitely an issue needing addressing in the Vodafone core network. 

root@OpenWrt-1:~# mtr -ezb4w -c 100 1.1.1.1
Start: 2023-04-10T20:33:36+0100
HOST: OpenWrt-1 Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev
1. AS13335 one.one.one.one (1.1.1.1) 25.0% 100 41.8 41.4 32.6 51.3 4.6

--- 1.1.1.1 ping statistics ---
204 packets transmitted, 172 received, 15.6863% packet loss, time 20678ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 31.604/43.003/54.681/3.774 ms

Clearly several users have simultaneously started encountering the same - and it seems one Vodafone Engineer even acknowledged it above. 

[trisk3ll]

I wrote about a month ago, back on Feb 5th and posted some charts showing packet loss on my 4G vodafone connection.

I bought a brand new 4G/5G router wanting to see if the problem existing on both bands. Unfortunately I'm not within range of vodafone's 5G network so I've remained on 4G.

Attached are updated charts showing disconnections and packet loss over February however.

As you can see the issue is worse for me during the week and better on weekends. It's possible to read that there has been a small improvement since the 27th Feb, but still quite high packet loss.

[Beth]

Hi @trisk3ll! If you haven't already, please reach out to our Social Media team and we'll be able to investigate further. To avoid having to repeat yourself, please include a link to the thread and your username in your message to the team 🙂

[HarrisonC]

I am still getting the same issue. Unfortunately this has led me to getting a EE contract instead and I am going to try and cancel my Vodafone SIM, just not worth the issues for £8 a month difference.

[Lynxthecat]

So did you get an update on the below? This is very obviously a widespread problem with the Vodafone celullar network right now. Can't one of the moderators check in with whatever case the messages below relate to? Or provide us with a generalized status update? 

02 feb:

I have some positive news. Off the back of your report and a little internal testing we found a minor capacity constraint within our core network. We are in the process of migrating some traffic but it will be a gradual process, therefore I hope we will start to see improvements week on week. 

08 feb:

We had another migration yesterday which should’ve been a step closer to resolution, I wouldn’t say we are fully in the clear yet but certainly on the right track.

[kocz]

Those communications are from a direct conversation with one of the internal network engineers, so there's no complaint or case number attached.

I sent over a bunch of data and packet traces, but unfortunately it seems to have made little progress in fixing the problem. How this has been ongoing for nearly 5 months now I'll never know...

[Lynxthecat]

Are the moderators of this forum really not in a position to raise an internal ticket relating to the sheer number of simultaneous reports of exactly the same thing? There have been repeated calls for individuals all voicing the same issue to get in touch with the social media team - but we've all had the same experience of immense frustration with the same. 

Moderators - please can you raise a collective issue relating to the many repeated requests on this thread? 

It's very very obviously a widespread problem - this packet loss issue has even been acknowledged by an internal engineer: 

02 feb:

I have some positive news. Off the back of your report and a little internal testing we found a minor capacity constraint within our core network. We are in the process of migrating some traffic but it will be a gradual process, therefore I hope we will start to see improvements week on week. 

08 feb:

We had another migration yesterday which should’ve been a step closer to resolution, I wouldn’t say we are fully in the clear yet but certainly on the right track.

Is it too much to ask for an update concerning the attempts to address the packet loss at the core network level? 

[Pluginz]

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65607601.amp

F in useless crappy waste of our precious time in life company 

[nullabletype]

I've been experiencing this too since late last year. Works fine during the day / really late evening but from 6-11 PM roughly it starts getting severe packet loss at 20-50%. Most general browsing seems okay, but streaming services like youtube are unusable. I swap over to a smarty sim served by the same mast and the issue goes away.

Frustratingly though as the cells are postioned differently, the signal quality and strength are much better from the vodafone cells over three for us resulting in better speeds when its actually working.

I've experienced this issue in multiple routers (Huawei CPE/Gigacube, multiple mikrotik devices etc.) and the signal stats do not change between time periods.

[bpr]

The pattern is consistent and very easy to prove (I too have tried multiple routers and Lebara/Voxi/Voda SIMs, it happens on all 3..) , it's just annoying Voda are not making it apparent if they're doing anything about it.