Consistent Large Packet Loss on Dallas-area Charter Equipment
Since last Wednesday or so, I've been experiencing significant packet loss that seems to be happening on Spectrum equipment:
This has actually gotten worse today, and it's pretty disruptive. Any chance somebody could forward this to your technical team?
Answers
-
Hello @thisismyusername,
Welcome to the Community, Sorry to hear that you're experiencing connectivity issues. We are happy to assist! Are you currently wired or wireless?
0 -
Wired. This isn't happening locally at me. This is happening in a Spectrum data center in the Dallas area.
0 -
Just want to corroborate what thisismyusername is seeing, im seeing the exact same behavior. Intermittent ping spiking and packet loss, extremely disruptive to all real time applications.
0 -
It's important to keep in mind that when you run a traceroute it pings each hop your data would take along the way, and the primary function of a hop is to forward data to the next, not respond to pings. They may delay or not respond at all if they are busy, but it does not mean they are having a problem forwarding. To find where a problem starts we are looking for the earliest packet loss that trends to all following hops, and you should run multiple tests to different servers as intermittent issues can give very skewed data off one test as it does not ping them all simultaneously.
@thisismyusername Your traceroute is showing 12.2% packet loss on hop 2. There are no hops after that show an increase which carries consistently over to the next. Hop 9 only has 2.4%, and the final two hops ar 7.3% and 17.1%, which is +/- 5% of the 12% on 2. It looks like you may have a fluctuating amount of loss between 2-17%, but the overall trend is a spike at hop 2 and then straight down.
@actualengineer Similarly, we see 5.9% on hop 2, and we see it trend straight down to 5.9% on 4, 3.9% on 8, and 7.8% on 10 and 11. Hop 2 is usually the modem and should not have any issues responding to pings, this is strong evidence these are localized individual issues.
I recommend bypassing your routers and testing wired straight into the modem after a reboot. Run multiple tests to different servers to see if the trend holds. If so, an appointment with a technician would be appropriate.
@BAfromSC is in a different area and has made a seperate post which we will continue monitoring.
1 -
@William_M I've done everything you've suggested. I event went as far as swapping my personal model for a spectrum one. It does not make any difference. Also, before I swapped my own modem I took some screenshots which I will put below this text (this is after the modem has been on for months):
The signal and connection are pretty much perfect and I assume (though I cannot see it anymore with the new modem) that they still are.
Ill re-iterate what I've said. About two weeks ago I suddenly started having intermittent packet loss and ping spikes on my connection. These lasts anywhere from about 5 seconds to 30 seconds. During these events online gaming becomes unplayable and other real time applications get interrupted. In competitive online games unfortunately even 5 seconds can be an eternity and can mean a loss or a win. My facetime calls with family are also affected.
I've seen this exact issue being reported in several different places, all reporting it starting around the same date.
I hope Spectrum can find a fix for this because I don't think there's anything I can do personally at this point (I would).
Anyway, thanks for the assistance I appreciate it.
0 -
@actualengineer, while the signal levels are healthy your modem has logged 1169 T3 Timeouts in just the one week it has been online. Did the additional traceroutes you ran show a different trend? I don't see you have scheduled an appointment with a technician like I suggested, would you like for me to reach out in a DM to set that up?
I play online games myself and I do understand how frustrating connection issues can be, but almost all complaints about the internet come in the form of no internet, slow internet, or intermittent internet, so it can be easy to find others in an area as populated as Dallas with the exact same problem. It does not mean they have the exact same cause. The traceroute you have provided shows the issue starting around hop 2 which is very local to you and needs an appointment with a technician to fix. If you evidence to the contrary please provide it and I will be happy to review it to see if I can report it to our engineers.
2 -
I think you are right that the issue is somewhat local and if you think a service call could get the ball rolling on getting this resolved I more than welcome your DM.
As far as the T3 timeouts go I can no longer see the signal levels or log pages anymore as I am on a Spectrum modem now.
The trend is that there's lag spikes and packet loss between my modem "inf" hop and the first "lag". Unfortunately, what makes a cable provider a cable provider happens between those two at other (not visible to me) layers.
For what it is worth, on my old SB6183 I did see some of the T3 timeouts but some time ago log-timestamps were no longer being populated so I had no way of knowing how many happened. The other notable thing is that I only had 3 upstream channels before the swap where I know that in the months leading up to the issue I still had 4. My guess is these are routine network changes as spectrum slowly moves away from docsis 3.0.
0
