Get periods of poor latency on Sky broadband - What is jitter?

NeilF

NeilF

NeilF

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So a couple of weeks ago I noticed I was getting bad pings/latency when gaming, seemingly in the evenings.

Now I've been with Sky broadband (ADSL) for years, and I've always had a pretty rock solid service. But now, sometimes I'm actually getting kicked out of games because the latency is getting so bad.

I'm running Ping Plotter to google.com and bbc.co.uk and can see times where my pings go up to numerous hundreds, and the little jitter graph maxes out. I'll swear one night I left it running on a PC and could see poor performance until about 0:30am when it then suddenly stopped - Obviously everyone had gone to bed hours before that!

I phoned Sky and they said they only cover the download/upload speeds which of course are ok (13mb down and 1mb up), not latency!

So I'm a bit confused what to to investigate/look into next TBH.

QUESTION:-
If with PingPlotter I see my first hop and its latency is say 150, then surely that shows an issue between me and the sky network? As I type this my latency is around 100ms + to this first hop! And this is just one pc plugged into the router and wireless disabled!

My confusion is if I just a broadband speed test (Ookla) it's reporting 25ms!? So am I misunderstanding something?



NOTE: If I run a broadband speed test, I notice my latency (of say 25ms) goes to about 50ms while downloading but then sky rockets (to over 1000ms or even fails) during the upload test... I assume that is natural and to be expected?
 
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The ping times to various hops along the way to your destination are irrelevant to the latency calculations between you and the target - many routers will be configured to treat ICMP echo at a low priority. Why your first hop appears to be related to the Swedish Kennel Club is the bigger question here. Are you using a VPN?

Edit: Oh, it's a typo of isp.sky.com.
 
Here are some screen shots of my PC, connected straight into the router, with nothing else wired into it, even Wifi is turned off...

You can see here I was in one of these "periods" where my latency seemed bad.

Ten minutes later all is OK and it was back to a nice low figure again, and as I type this, an hour later, I've even plugged everything back in and I and my son (on an XBox) can all play with rock solid still with low latency again! Those two graphs are now showing a nice 25-45ms response... The odd spike, but generally straight back to something nice again the next poll.

It feels like something is periodically happening up the line which means we're all over the shop!

These shows pings to a random game server and google.com...

zMsBwk3.png


KSCbECX.png
 
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Here's another example of how bad it can get at times...

And sometimes I even see some "current values" returned as "*" during these periods. eg: I can see the value for "be437.pr3.bllon.isp.sky.com" at bad times with a current value of "*"?

Now surely if high pings or "*" to that address show it's something further down the line, but even my speed to my first port of call in sky is slow/laggy?

Note: And this performance is the same to my random game server IP and google.com.

kGjPZAE.png
 
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Ignore the 100% loss on certain hops, it's meaningless. See the several hops I have using the same tool to the same destination:

0rXAEZI.png
 
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Caged said:
Ignore the 100% loss on certain hops, it's meaningless.
Click to expand...
I am... It's the rest of the crud performance (at times) I'm talking about :(

ie:-

And sometimes I even see some "current values" returned as "*" during these periods. eg: I can see the value for "be437.pr3.bllon.isp.sky.com" at bad times with a current value of "*"?

Now surely if high pings or "*" to that address show it's something further down the line, but even my speed to my first port of call in sky is slow/laggy?
Click to expand...
 
Are you on Sky Connect? You could 'just' be suffering from a congested link between your exchange and Sky's network.
 
Caged said:
Are you on Sky Connect? You could 'just' be suffering from a congested link between your exchange and Sky's network.
Click to expand...
Sorry... What is Sky Connect...? (google doesn't help me work it out)

I'm on regular ADSL, which is the same as I've been on for many many years seemingly trouble free until this month?
 
Interesting! Even though in previous tests (ie: see above) I'll swear I've had a single PC plugged into the router and even had wireless disabled, last night I had an interesting experience.

I notice some poor latency (100+), so I turned wiresless off, and immediately back down to 24ms. Enabled it, and soon enough, back to poor performance. So then went around the various wireless devices in the house turning them off one at a time, and it turned out - at least in this case - it was my daughter's IPod touch, on which she was playing music.

Now, we also have two ipads, two laptops, and 3xphones and other devices (eg: Amazon Echo) all of which have been around for ages, yet here we have my daughter's ipod touch, which she got a couple of months ago, being the only one causing an issue?

I can sit there playing online with my son playing online on his xbox (also using is ipad at the same time somehow!?!?!?) and my parter browsing on her laptop... fine. But then when my daughter turned her ipod touch back on, and listened to music, then the latency would shoot in to 100-200 land!


Now I can't say if this is the cause, as I'll need to do further testing. But it was interesting!
 
They're both latency monitoring services.

Is your daughter streaming the music over the Internet, as in viewing YouTube music videos?

It doesn't take much to saturate an ADSL connection.
 
KIA said:
Is your daughter streaming the music over the Internet, as in viewing YouTube music videos?

It doesn't take much to saturate an ADSL connection.
Click to expand...

Yes... But surely streaming mp3 music is hardly even going to dent the down stream?

Meanwhile for years we've had an xbox, laptops and Ipads all on at the same time seemingly with no similar effects...

I'll carry on testing...
 
You're kind of polishing a turd at this point trying to coax decent performance out of an ADSL line. Content is only getting larger.

How was your daughter listening to music on the iPod? If it's iTunes with the music library in the cloud then it doesn't really stream as much as attempt to download the entire track into the cache, so the data rate consumed will be higher than the bitrate of the audio, and more bursty.
 
Caged said:
You're kind of polishing a **** at this point trying to coax decent performance out of an ADSL line. Content is only getting larger.
Click to expand...
Maybe so... But as I said for years now, I've been happily playing games, while my son has also on his XBox(wired) and other members of the house have been browsing etc over wireless devices.

It's like there's something specific about the ipod touch or the source of the music she's listening too etc. As I said I'll do some more testing.
 
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