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#3912 - 01/26/22 06:08 AM Packet Loss at night - building my case
Peat Offline


Registered: 01/26/22
Posts: 2
Hi all,

I moved house in June of last year and have been experiencing issues with my connection from the off. To most users, it would be a bit of a *shrug* issue. When streaming, it occasionally stops and buffers.
However, I play an online racing game called iRacing, where the issue is far more of a nuisance. I was first put onto pingplotter by the staff at iRacing when I was trying to find out why opponents cars were disappearing all the time and occasionally getting booted from server.

To cut a long story short, I have observed that from around 5pm through to 7am (darkness hours) I get frequent & severe packet loss. I am currently running a 48hr plot and i'm confident the graph will demonstrate how the issue shows itself at primarily at night.

So far I have been pinging the iRacing race serves in Boston (I am in the UK) and a packet loss 'event' usually looks like this: https://share.pingplotter.com/MtVKdAmX9Pv

The loss is almost always from Hop #2 onwards. So, my understanding from my research is that it's likely between my house and that first external IP.
At my end, I have already swapped out Router/Modem, ADSL cable and Microfilter to rule out those. So I feel it's now between the BT faceplate (i run out of the test socket) and the ISP's (TalkTalk) first IP address.

Should I now focus pinging to IP's at #2 & #3? I feel like cross-atlantic run to iRacing Boston server muddies the waters on the trace. What would be a sensible UK address to ping?

I searched the first IP address(https://who.is/whois-ip/ip-address/78.144.1.1) and it appears to be in Amsterdam(?).

----------------------------------------------
My dealings with my ISP(TalkTalk) thus far:
Over the first 6 months, I contacted them via the helplines and online chat about 5 times. Each time, I would receive the usual advice (turn router on and off).

[Interestingly, I was once instructed to reset the DSL and it seemed to clean up the problem. However, having done this a hundred times since, it's a 1-in-10 chance of helping and if it does, it's only ever temporary.]

Just before Christmas, I was eventually able to get the issue escalated within TalkTalk and they agreed to send an Openreach (the company that owns the UK physical phone/network infrastructure) engineer out to my house. He visited last week, spent an hour or so monitoring my connection (during the day) and declared I was getting full speed service. I showed him my collected evidence to the contrary (mainly StarTrinity CST showing repeated speed drops and packet loss) and he proffered that I could be experiencing a 'REIN' (interference somewhere on the line) issue at that it would be almost impossible to diagnose/rectify.

I have done some cursory listening tests at home with an AM radio and switching off nearby appliances to rule them out. I have even been setting off the neighbors outdoor lights and monitoring my connection to see if they could interfering. It's really quite mad. A remaining hypothesis is a house 1 street away has a load of CD / HAM radio aerials on the roof/in the garden. But unless he switches on his transmitter at 5pm and uses it all night everyday, I struggle to see how/why it would be that.

Other neighbors complain that they have poor internet, but it's hard to get very far with them as they have wildly varying levels of understanding. (i'm very much a curious novice btw). One neighbour did tell me that they had an engineer to their property and he told them that the local exchange had suffered from water ingress/corrosion.

Anyway, If you can decipher that stream on consciousness - well done. I am looking for help/suggestions of what I can do to convince my ISP that there is indeed an issue, and how to get them to fix.

- Initial thought was overloaded network traffic, but i ruled that out because the problems remain all night long. (How many normal working people on my street can seriously be up hammering the internet at 4am?)

- I have replaced all hardware my end. Since using pingplotter, I can now see the pings between my devices and the router are OK.

- REIN. I don't know where to go with this hypothesis. I guess a step wpuld be to follow the overhead wires all the way to the exchange and listen for a noise? But Even if there is, what then??

EDIT: 36hr trace: https://share.pingplotter.com/CHZyHxK8fkT
Shows the night time packet loss from Hop2 onwards quite clearly

Yours in desperation,

Peat



Edited by Peat (01/27/22 03:06 AM)

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#3915 - 01/27/22 10:40 PM Re: Packet Loss at night - building my case [Re: Peat]
Poe Offline
Pingman Tools Support


Registered: 02/11/19
Posts: 77
Hi Peat,

Thanks for the very detailed information!

So it seems that there are a few issues showing up in the data set that you linked to. First, from 7:30 AM until 9:17 AM I see something that looks a bit like low-level bandwidth saturation (I am looking at the data in the 3-hr trace graph view). This starts at hop #1 (which I'm guessing is your router). There is a bit of packet loss but not a lot and much of it seems like it starts at hop #2 or #3.

Second, after 9:17 AM the latency drops down and stays lowish 80-100 ms to the final hop (not bad for hopping the pond). The packet loss on the other hand goes way up and intensifies throughout the day starting at hop #2 primarily and going through to the final hop. Your router is dropping a few packets here and there but nothing to worry about. At 10:00 pm the PL clearly tapers down and there are fewer packets being lost (likely because there is less traffic).

For the first issue, I'd suggest tracing to your router IP address (192.168.1.1) the IP address of the machine you're running PingPlotter on (on Windows open CMD -> type ipconfig and likely look the IPv4 address. On Mac open System Preferences -> Network -> Advanced -> TCP/IP -> look for the IPV4 address), and finally, the loopback address of your machine (127.0.0.1) just to rule out any internal issues with the TCP stack. If the issue is present on your machine IP or the loopback address then it's an issue with that computer/NIC. If not, then it's an issue originating at your router.

For the second issue, since it's likely not in your network you'll need to work with the ISP to get someone to test the line from the street to your house and then look at hop #2 (78.144.1.1) which belongs to TalkTalk (https://whois.domaintools.com/78.144.1.1). Once you've ruled out the line the data that you linked to should make a clear case for the ISP to take a look at that device to see why it is dropping so many packets. Here is an image URL of what I have been looking at which may also help.

Another random thought would be to have some of your neighbors run PingPlotter too (free 14-day trial!) and see if they get similar results with hop #2. We have had several customers do this exact thing to prove to the ISP that it's a bigger problem than just one person's line/equipment. Just a thought...

Let me know if there's anything else I can help with and also how it goes!

Thanks,

-Poe

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#3916 - 01/28/22 04:35 AM Re: Packet Loss at night - building my case [Re: Poe]
Peat Offline


Registered: 01/26/22
Posts: 2
Thanks Poe, I'll get to work on your suggestions.

I had already just arrived at the 'test from a neighbors connection' idea if only just to rule out the wire from the pole to my house. I am going to move my version of pingplotter onto a laptop so I can be a bit more mobile and perhaps leave it running in my neighbours houses.

What IP should I ping when doing this? If there is something physically wrong with the infra, I suppose the hop 2 issue should show regardless of what ISP IP it goes to?

I ran a test last night straight to a TalkTalk IP (one i have been assigned before (0-15). WHere this would usually be hop#2, it has become hop#3 and a mystery 2nd hop has emerged: https://share.pingplotter.com/E66EX8Ee6rp



I guess

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