Extremely high packetloss at one of the charter hops during ping tests

dannygdammit

I've been having some various internet issues and just had a tech out again.. We've had at least 20 people out this past year.. Generally, the internet functions okay, but the stability seems questionable on some days.. The jitter fluctuates a lot on my internet tests. I'm on ethernet and located in Western NC. The tech that was just out here said that he could see some signal issues on the main line, but that they can be really difficult to pinpoint where they are coming from. When I run pingplotter there's one address that shows up, day after day, consistently averaging 80-90% packetloss. I'm not exactly sure what this indicates, but if it is an issue, I'm hoping this would be helpful to spectrum..

The address with a ton of packetloss is 96.34.0.133 and the name shows up as lag-805.bbr02atlnga.netops.charter.com

There's another address that doesn't have packetloss but is showing a ton of jitter and ping spikes, and that one is 96.34.2.50 and the name is lag-808.bbr01spbgsc.netops.charter.com

Every other hop looks just fine.

HT_Greenfield

ICMP echo and relay are two different things. Echo is low-priority trivia; relay is the main purpose of routers. The relay performance of any router has to be at least as good as the echo performance of every router beyond as well as the end point.

All 239 packets of the first test round-tripped the end-point with outstanding ante-latency.

Same for all but one of the 448 of the second test and you can see that last one wasn't lost on Charter netops and probably just hadn't made the round trip by the instant of time at which the test ended.

A simple ping test to the end-point would have indicated in advance how trivial of a pursuit a "ping plotter" test would be.

William_M

Hi @dannygdammit, welcome to our community!

Do you see the 80-90% packet loss on every hop after, including the destination server? Could you share the full traceroute?

dannygdammit

Thank you for the reply.. This is what things generally look like when I run this. If I let it run longer, the packetloss is usually in the upper 80%

dannygdammit

I'm going to attach an additional image, in case this is helpful.. I pinged Twitter this time.. So it's this same address with the packetloss, but at 12:46 this hop changed to a different address, and there wasn't any packetloss.. and then at 12:56, the address reappeared with packetloss.

dannygdammit

Following up here since I haven't heard anything back.

William_M

Hey there @dannygdammit, sorry I've been away.

@HT_Greenfield is correct, your traceroutes don't show any issue. If any one hop was causing an issue such as packet loss, we'd expect to see similar packet loss on every single hop after including the destination IP. Could you elaborate on the exact issues you are having using the internet service, besides what you are seeing on tests?

dannygdammit

William, thank you for asking. Yes, I can elaborate a little. I'll try to condense everything because a lot has happened since we moved here 5 years ago. When we moved to our this house we had a variety of issues (TV cable cutting out, internet cutting out even on ethernet). Spectrum couldn't find the issue so we ended up canceling our TV because it got so bad at one point. A couple years later, we had a bunch of issues with intermittent internet again, and finally they figured out it had something to do with the wiring.

During gaming, I have been getting some packetloss. I even upgraded from our basic 300 Mbps plan to 1Gbps/35upload in hopes that it would resolve any bandwidth or throttling issues. It's been tough to notice a pattern of when these issues occur. I would think it would occur during busier times, but it still feels random—sometimes at 2pm on a weekday, and sometimes a midnight on a weeknight. We had a quality control specialist out about 6 months ago and said there was very clear interference on our line. He was going to put in an order to fix it, but it would probably take a few weeks to find the issue (because sometimes it could just be a bad fitting on someone's house). So I gave it a couple of months and called back in, only to find out that the order 'wasn't put in correctly' so no one came out. They sent a maintenance crew out after that call, who upgraded the line outside from a 4 port (with a splitter on each port) to an 8 port hub (since there are 8 houses). It still doesn't feel resolved though. Unfortunately, since I've started PC gaming, I've really become hyperaware of any dips in performance, especially since I can measure it. Of course, there are other factors, like hardware, software, gaming servers, etc.. but I have 2 separate high end PCs, and play a few different games (on different servers), which is helpful in testing. When things were really bad, I would connect the modem directly to the PC and retest (after rebooting of course) and I would get the same amount of packetloss. For a while, things seemed to be better, but now I am once again getting packetloss in game. Honestly, games have been nearly unplayable lately. I've been rubberbanding, stuttering, teleporting, etc.

I also started running Exitlag, which actually makes a very noticeable difference in my connection. Ping goes from about 50 to 25 in game, and it feels noticeably smoother. Occasionally, it will start spiking mid-game where I'll get these 5% packetloss spikes, and I'll force quit it, going back to my usual. I keep running tests with and without it.

The last tech that came out told me that he could see 'some interference on the main line' but mentioned that it would be really hard to find the issue.. which obviously leaves me with a ton of questions.. but at the end of the appt, he said my signals looked good. So I'm always skeptical if people are just trying to leave because they don't feel like dealing with something that isn't a wire or a modem or a router.. it's been frustrating. I'm fine accepting that it could be something unrelated, and to consider other factors, but it's been really hard to diagnose since I don't feel Spectrum has ever been forthcoming (and no one seems to communicate with each other), and I really just want to get it resolved.

When I run just speed tests, ping can range from low 30s to 60s.. but it's usually in the low 30s. The jitter fluctuates a ton though—sometimes 5ms and sometimes 60ms. So typically, I like to use something that can run for a while since it's never consistent (and that's why I was using ping plotter).

I'm going to add this.. I ran a test on packetlosstest.com just a second ago (on ethernet).. I ran it for a minute. 3530 of 3599 were sent.. and 3507 out of 3599 were received. It says 0.7% late (23 / 3530), but also says 0% packetloss. This is with QOS enabled on Asus TR-AX68U Router. This is actually the second router I've purchased, and I purchased it for the QOS.. Games tend to run better with traditional QOS and prioritizing my PC. I get the occassional 1-2% packetloss, but it's much less than without QOS.

After disabling the QOS, I ran the same test. 3530 of 3599 were sent.. and 3499 out of 3599 were received. It says 0.9% late (31 / 3530), but it says 0% packetloss. Latency also went up slightly.

I'm happy to provide any other info. And I'm perfectly fine admitting fault here if it has nothing to do with Spectrum. I just want to find the issue. I'd also love to run more tests if you have recommendations. And most of all, I appreciate your time.

William_M

Will you please run a basic ping test? To do this on Windows press the Windows key on your keyboard, type "cmd" in the search bar, and press Enter. This will open the Command Prompt. In the Command Prompt window, type "ping -t 8.8.8.8" and press Enter. This command will send continuous ping requests to the IP 8.8.8.8, until you press Control+C to end the test and get your final results. You can replace the 8.8.8.8 (Google DNS) with other pingable IPs, multiple command prompts can be opened and running the test simultaneously to see if packets are just dropping to one IP or the entire internet connection. You can leave them running for as long as needed which is helpful for intermittent problems like this, leave them running while gaming to see if you are dropping packets at the same time you have issues in game. If you do see packet loss on these tests, please bypass your router and test again before sharing your results here.

dannygdammit

William, I ran a bunch of tests last night using command prompt, I had 0% packetloss on all but one test. I had pinged a number of servers (including google, along with some different gaming servers). So I don't believe there to be any definitive evidence that this is a ISP issue.

I also noticed last night that my BIOS settings had been reset (likely after the update that I ran 2 weeks ago). My ram speeds and overclocking were back to factory settings—and for CPU intensive games, I believe this to be the cause of rubberbanding and game hitches.

While I still get some packetloss in game, I think I can attribute it to either game servers or traceroute. The VPN helps quite a bit with this.

So I'm going to run some more command prompt tests at different times over the next few days, just to make sure that what I saw last night is the norm, but I think you were right. I do appreciate your help with this and ruling out the ISP. I'll respond here if the next tests show anything different. Anyways, I do greatly appreciate your time and help!