Interesting BT Issue

[MarkA]

For all the years I've worked in IT, I'm a little baffled on how this issue is occurring.

Normally - my pings to bbc.co.uk or google dns (8.8.8.8) are around 10-15ms
Normally - my throughput is between 60-76mbps on BT Fibre2 Unlimited (80/20)

Issue:
Pings are high (10 - 150ms) - when using a small amount of bandwidth. (1mbps)
Pings are high (20 - 150ms) - when using a medium amount of bandwidth (3mbps)
Pings are high (70 - 250ms) - when using a large amount of bandwidth (7mbps)
Pings are low (10-15ms) - when doing absolutely nothing on the network.

I have an Ubiquiti Edgemax Lite3 router, attached to a fibre modem and this has been solid for about 2 years now. It also has traffic analysis, so I can see on the network - which devices are pulling what throughput. The above testing is done, when there is literally nothing else happening on the network, when I say nothing - I mean there's about 100KB-300KB/s being Tx/Rx from my other connected devices).

Nothing has changed my end, for a long time, although with the above issue, I'm trying to figure out where the issue lays.
I'm going to swap my equipment out, back to the BT Homehub when I get home tonight to test.
I'm wondering if anyone has seen this type of issue before?
- If you have - what was the fix?
- If you haven't - what else can I check?

Is it worth a BT Support phonecall?

Low ping is essential to gaming for me.
I can't do any sort of gaming (warping), when the wife is watching Netflix etc...

 

[MarkA]

Here's mine, from idle connection to tracing during full download speed:


Tracing route to www.google.co.uk [216.58.204.67]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.0.254
2 4 ms 4 ms 4 ms 172.16.16.61
3 * * * Request timed out.
4 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms 31.55.187.180
5 11 ms 10 ms 10 ms core1-hu0-6-0-8.southbank.ukcore.bt.net [213.121.192.76]
6 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms 109.159.252.82
7 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms 109.159.253.73
8 * * * Request timed out.
9 10 ms 11 ms 10 ms 108.170.233.232
10 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms 74.125.242.83
11 13 ms 13 ms 13 ms 209.85.250.185
12 12 ms 12 ms 11 ms 216.239.58.2
13 14 ms 13 ms 14 ms 108.170.246.161
14 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms 108.170.238.123
15 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms lhr25s13-in-f67.1e100.net [216.58.204.67]

Trace complete.


While downloading at 7.8MB/s

Tracing route to lhr25s13-in-f67.1e100.net [216.58.204.67]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.0.254
2 30 ms 20 ms 15 ms 172.16.16.61
3 * * * Request timed out.
4 40 ms 33 ms 30 ms 31.55.187.180
5 49 ms 43 ms 55 ms core1-hu0-6-0-8.southbank.ukcore.bt.net [213.121.192.76]
6 47 ms 51 ms 50 ms 109.159.252.82
7 70 ms 67 ms 54 ms 109.159.253.73
8 * * * Request timed out.
9 64 ms 64 ms 70 ms 108.170.233.232
10 69 ms 68 ms 53 ms 74.125.242.83
11 53 ms 47 ms 53 ms 209.85.250.185
12 55 ms 51 ms 48 ms 216.239.58.2
13 64 ms 62 ms 56 ms 108.170.246.129
14 58 ms 50 ms 46 ms 108.170.238.123
15 72 ms 62 ms 60 ms lhr25s13-in-f67.1e100.net [216.58.204.67]

Trace complete.

 

[MarkA]

I'll have to have a look at mine when I get home - I've not configured the port to allow access via the LAN (echolife hg612).

 

[MarkA]

It's better... when connecting using the homehub, compared to my own equipment. I have netflix running in the living room and barely got any ping jumps, compared to yesterday. Albeit, not totally static as I would hope, but a little better. With Netflix off, I get a flat 10ms-15ms to bbc.co.uk, without any spiking.


My router stats from the homehub says my SNR is

DSL Link Up: Down Rate=72470Kbps, Up Rate=20000Kbps; SNR Margin Down=3.4dB, Up=6.7dB

It's not great though, so I'll work from home tomorrow and give them a ring in the morning to see if there's anything they can see. This is the main reason I wanted to swap back to the homehub before I test, since they'll need me on it before they do any in-depth testing if i remember correctly.

.. and no worries lltfdaniel, I didn't see you as hijacking!

 

[MarkA]

What is this fibre modem you are referring to? I can see 172.16.16.61 in your traceroutes which doesn't look right.

That's a hop with BT, nothing to do with my equipment as far as I know.
I swapped out my modem/router to the bthomehub and the same hop is there.

 

[MarkA]

Connecting to the bthomehub, I can see the default IP of the WAN connection is 172.16.16.61, which is the next hop:

TCP / IP Settings
Broadband network IP address: 86.135.44.163
Default gateway: 172.16.16.61
Primary DNS: 81.139.57.100
Secondary DNS: 81.139.56.100

I had an hour long conversation with a helpful english-speaking BT Plus diagnostics guy. He says he checked everything, did some speed tests although, nothing related to latency. Basically at the end of it, said that everything I was experiencing was within the thresholds of what they expect people to get.
Very little drop-outs reported (reconnects from modem to BT) and nothing to note.
I advised him that when I start a download or even watch netflix, my pings go high, almost immediately.

This is it right now - with only around 40% bandwidth utilisation.

 

[MarkA]

Ethernet (Intel onboard NIC) shows 1gbps connectivity.
It's directly connected into the BTHomeHub, I've also tested having only my PC and HomeHub on the network.

Just swapped over the network cable from the back of my PC to the HomeHub too.
Just copied over a 550MB file from my NAS to my PC, without any ping degradation. So my NIC is totally capable of handling high throughput, and so is the HomeHub switching capabilities.

Edit 2: This smells of a local issue rather than the Internet connection. Your latency increases before it even leave your router judging by the tracerts posted earlier

Hop #2 --> 2 30 ms 20 ms 15 ms 172.16.16.61

This is where the latency starts in my opinion? This is the default gateway (aka - another router on BT's network) down the other side of the copper wire leaving my house. The latency starts at that hop, not my router - so doesn't that rule out a local issue?

The only SNR value I can get is this in the troubleshooting log from yesterdays reboot:

19:08:29, 07 Feb. DSL Link Up: Down Rate=72420Kbps, Up Rate=20000Kbps; SNR Margin Down=3.4dB, Up=6.7dB

 

[MarkA]

Stats recorded 10 Feb 2019 20:58:27

DSLAM type / S
Modem/router firmware: AnnexA version - A2pv6C038m.d24j
DSL mode: VDSL2 Profile 17a
Status: Showtime
Uptime: 2 days 4 hours 17 min 31 sec
Resyncs: 0 (since 10 Feb 2019 20:58:24)
W version: BDCM:0xb12d (177.45) / v0xb12d

Downstream Upstream
Line attenuation (dB): 14.7 0.0
Signal attenuation (dB): Not monitored
Connection speed (kbps): 73406 20000
SNR margin (dB): 3.2 9.4
Power (dBm): 13.3 6.5
Interleave depth: 8 1
INP: 53.00 0
G.INP: Enabled Not enabled
Vectoring status: 5 (VECT_UNCONFIGURED)


RSCorr/RS (%): 0.0067 0.0000
RSUnCorr/RS (%): 0.0000 0.0000
ES/hour: 0 0

This is my TBB ping graph:

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broa...hare/3231b72aaeddbe9affa9fa90faf557992b6ebe08

 

[MarkA]

id say this is a pretty normal issue that many shared internet users have come across.

I get that pings will not be perfect, when others are sharing the bandwidth, but the increase is not considered normal. I know this having kept an eye on my pings for the last 20 years, gaming, streaming etc..
You can test this yourself too, download something at 25% of your maximum download speed and then test your pings, this would be a good way of analysing whether my pings are higher or lower than expected, although I expect them to be much higher. I feel that your tagging this issue with a 'this is normal' tag, but forgetting that this is occurring at around 25% of bandwidth, not 75-100% of bandwidth.

Everything that needs a good connection, is connected via Ethernet (including the FireTV netflix box), everything else is connected via Wireless (mobiles, amazon echo etc..).

I've enabled QoS on my router for some testing later on. I'm going to be restricting QoS to only allow 50% of my usage to be chewed up by all devices in my home, with small udp packets to be priorities over fatter, longer lasting packets. It's a shame I have to try and workaround an issue at the BT end.

That sounds like normal buffer bloat to me, if you have a Ubiquiti router you can enable smart queues and test.

Have a look here for a good testing site: http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest

Thanks RSR, already all over it.
I seem to have buffer bload anywhere between B, C and D running multiple tests.

I'm also testing from the thinkbroadband speedtests

My single thread downloads are all over the place (tbbx1), ranging from a reporting 3.5Mbps to 56Mbps
I got the Smart Queues enabled, I need to edit some of the download and upload settings to try and figure out how to get the most consistent and lowest pings.

 

[MarkA]

While looking into this - one of my colleague pointed me out to this:
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/8274-caerphilly-added-to-list-of-fast-exchanges

Checked with bt.com - no gfast available on my account.
Checked with openreach - they say its ready.
Checked with another provider (zen) - they say they can provide me up to 130~Mbps

Called up BT, they said they can't provide it - as their systems have not yet updated and they basically see what I see on my account in bt.com
They say to wait a few weeks and keep checking the website, once its available there - it will be available to me.

Hopefully, this will mean they will have to move me on the infrastructure to somewhere new, especially as they will need an engineer visit to do it - which should mean they can physically test my line while they are there, to get max speed, low latency.