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

[KJASTR]

Yes they act like they dont know about it. I was fighting with them entire January, February, march. They won't let me cancel contract without paying fee. I am feed up with them. I have 2 more months and going somewhere else. Never experienced such a bad customer support service. I even send them videos of using their sim vs virgin, three, smarty to proof. I got contacted with shift manager recieving response: speed and ping is good so there is no valid reason to cancel contract. 

On top of that in most chat/ phone calls i made with them i have to explain tech support what even is packet loss...

Funny....

[bpr]

I've had packet loss monitoring set up for a few months now so it's very easy to determine when the packet loss occurs. Interestingly there was minimal loss between 4th and 14th May before it returned back to the usual loss between 12pm - 11pm.

Someone earlier on in the thread seemed to get through to a Voda engineer who at least acknowledged the problem but as far as I can see he's had no contact with them since Feb.

[HarrisonC]

Yeh, I was able to get out of it by escalating it high enough. If you hit a brick wall, ask for their manager (I know, Karen moment) and escalate further. I have had a number with Vodafone for about 10 years so I said did they want to lose me as a customer entirely or just for this one SIM.

[Pluginz]

If you want to get out of their stupid contract without paying early cancellation fees, do a little homework on the location and destination of your own internet connection. They cant win with data like this.

Tell Vodafone what router or connection you have.

Tell them where its going. Basically going to the wrong destination. The wrong IP address and the wrong data centre server.
If youre on Vodafone Europe, make damn sure that youre on Vodafone Europe and not Vodafone India for instance. Things like this make a massive difference to your internet connection.
 
Introduce them to a little techincal data on how bad your internet is and why its so bad. The pings and drop outs, they dont give a F about that.
Vodafone cannot have their cake and eat it both at the same time.

Persevere with this way of thinking and you'll be escalated to some kind of Vodafone manager, who no shadow of a doubt, will have no internet technical data skills and you'll win your case.
End of contract, no cancellation fee, F um.

[Pluginz]

I escaped a £145 early cancellation fee by doing this 🙂

[Lynxthecat]

Actually I had some success in simply not bothering with customer service (given earlier experience and facing repetitive nonsense relating to taking screenshots on my mobile phone and not router), and instead raising a complaint. I received a reasonable degree of compensation and a detailed and intelligent response from a network engineer including, amongst other statements, this statement:

I have investigated at network level and identified an issue which may have impacted the customers experience on Weds 10/05. This has been fully resolved and is under close observation whilst recovery is
still taking place.

Therefore I would advise simply opting for a detailed complaint at the earliest opportunity. 

[bpr]

It would be interesting to see the detail as going by what you've posted the issue you describe could have been a fault with your individual connection/service as the packet loss fault certainly hasn't been resolved as of 10th May. Though I understand why you may be reluctant to post the whole transcript.

[Pluginz]

I have investigated at network level and identified an issue which may have impacted the customers experience on Weds 10/05. This has been fully resolved and is under close observation whilst recovery is
still taking place.

I would love this to be a genuine response from Vodafone but somehow i dont think it is

[Lynxthecat]

So far so good from the very limited testing I've conducted, but I need to keep testing over the next few days. 

--- 1.1.1.1 ping statistics ---
4374 packets transmitted, 4351 received, 0.525835% packet loss, time 440761ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 40.602/61.295/343.900/15.553 ms, pipe 4

Concerning the remainder of the response, it pertained to connections and the loading of our local cell tower. This was clearly directly from a network engineer given the technical specifics.

[Lynxthecat]

Update: still working just fine. Either Vodafone have fixed this network-wide, or just for my connection.