At times I have the feeling that broadband performance is poor.
Using firefox under windows10, perhaps Gmail will complain it isn't connecting properly, or comments will not load on a website.

Sometimes it really is an indication that the linespeed has dropped unacceptably to half-bb or dial-up speed, sometimes the speed/bandwidth seems reasonable, should not be causing problems.

How can I tell how subjective poor broadband performance issues are due to the modem/router hardware (or possibly cable, connectors, laptop NIC), versus how much is due to intermittents on the line to exchange (and beyond), or possible over-allocation to capacity?

Out of curiosity I used pingman (pro, trial) to monitor the metre or so of cable to my router (router IP).

Surprisingly this is not rock-solid; there is a good average of 1.2mS, but some peaks of up to 3mS, and even some fast pings of 0.2mS. (see screenshot) Is this normal or indicative of breakdown?

Win10 command line >pathping to the router, however, says 0,0,0 mS (microsoft; it may well be lying, but not by much).

I am not seeing actual packet loss (except one router socket has died). I get comparable results when I reverse the cable to use the other set of wires in the cable(cat6), and when I replug at the router.

Monitoring remote sites (G~ DNS at 8.8.8.8, and my ISP), again I get some rare spikes, with a little accompanying jitter. These maybe double or treble the latency. Nevertheless, the signal gets through, without packetloss.

Pathping results look normal.


As I was writing, my connection to external sites was solid, but then connection was lost to one site (brief red bar), latencies grew in tandem, then the situation recovered. Some big jitter at the time. (See screenshots.)


I use speedof.me, a non-JS HTML5 speedtest. My laptop is a fairly old Dell, it has been scanned for malware using ESET online, which should catch most problems. Drivers are latest, so far as I can tell. But it's an old laptop. Current o/s is win10 (generally I would use a linux such as manjaro).