FTTC Issues - for future reference

[zappaDPJ]

In case it become necessary to provide details of my current connection problems I'll use this thread to keep them all in one place.

21:22 - 02/11/2010

Test1 comprises of two tests

1. Best Effort Test: -provides background information.

   Download Speed
   9299 Kbps
   
0 Kbps   38717 Kbps
Max Achievable Speed

> Download speedachieved during the test was - 9299 Kbps
For your connection, the acceptable range of speedsis 12000-38717 Kbps .
Additional Information:
IP Profile for your line is -38717 Kbps

2. Upstream Test: -provides background information.

   Upload Speed
   7957 Kbps
   
0 Kbps   10000 Kbps
Max Achievable Speed

>Upload speed achieved during the test was - 7957 Kbps
Additional Information:
Upstream Rate IP profile on your line is - 10000 Kbps


This test was not conclusive and further testing is required.This might be useful for your ISP to investigate the fault.

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7600]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

C:\Users\zappaDPJ>ping idnet.net

Pinging idnet.net [212.69.36.10] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 212.69.36.10: bytes=32 time=75ms TTL=59
Reply from 212.69.36.10: bytes=32 time=71ms TTL=59
Reply from 212.69.36.10: bytes=32 time=72ms TTL=59
Reply from 212.69.36.10: bytes=32 time=66ms TTL=59

Ping statistics for 212.69.36.10:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 66ms, Maximum = 75ms, Average = 71ms

C:\Users\zappaDPJ>tracert idnet.net

Tracing route to idnet.net [212.69.36.10]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  192.168.1.1
  2    88 ms    81 ms    83 ms  telehouse-gw4-lo2.idnet.net [212.69.63.99]
  3    88 ms     *       95 ms  telehouse-gw3-g0-1-400.idnet.net [212.69.63.243]

  4    98 ms    99 ms    99 ms  telehouse-gw5-e4-400.idnet.net [212.69.63.245]
  5    83 ms    87 ms    91 ms  redbus-gw2-g0-1-331.idnet.net [212.69.63.5]
  6    99 ms    96 ms    98 ms  redbus-gw1-fa2-0-300.idnet.net [212.69.63.225]
  7    87 ms    79 ms    76 ms  www.idnet.net [212.69.36.10]

Trace complete.

C:\Users\zappaDPJ>

[Rik]

 

[Holodene]

Damn. That isn't pretty.

[zappaDPJ]

It's what I'm now seeing every evening which suggests exchange congestion e.g. during the day I ping 7-9ms to IDNet but this is what I'm seeing now...

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7600]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

C:\Users\zappaDPJ>ping idnet.net

Pinging idnet.net [212.69.36.10] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 212.69.36.10: bytes=32 time=85ms TTL=59
Reply from 212.69.36.10: bytes=32 time=83ms TTL=59
Reply from 212.69.36.10: bytes=32 time=68ms TTL=59
Reply from 212.69.36.10: bytes=32 time=64ms TTL=59

Ping statistics for 212.69.36.10:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 64ms, Maximum = 85ms, Average = 75ms

C:\Users\zappaDPJ>tracert idnet.net

Tracing route to idnet.net [212.69.36.10]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  192.168.1.1
  2    60 ms    63 ms    60 ms  telehouse-gw2-lo1.idnet.net [212.69.63.51]
  3    62 ms    64 ms    66 ms  telehouse-gw3-g0-1-400.idnet.net [212.69.63.243]

  4    72 ms    75 ms    78 ms  telehouse-gw5-e4-400.idnet.net [212.69.63.245]
  5    78 ms    79 ms    96 ms  redbus-gw2-g0-1-331.idnet.net [212.69.63.5]
  6    76 ms    72 ms    69 ms  redbus-gw1-fa2-0-300.idnet.net [212.69.63.225]
  7    76 ms    78 ms    77 ms  www.idnet.net [212.69.36.10]

Trace complete.

C:\Users\zappaDPJ>

[sof2er]

That seems local-exchange related as I'm not having any ping fluctation at all.

Let support see your TBB Graphs, that should clearly show something is going wrong.

[zappaDPJ]

For reasons that I've yet to look into or understand, the TBB ping monitor has stopped recording since my last outage. However it does show when things started going downhill. This from a few days ago...

EDIT: It appears I've deleted my previous stats while trying to fix the issue  

EDIT (son of edit): I've had to set up a new one so I'll post that up in 24 hours.

[Rik]

 

I do that kid of thing regularly, Zap. It's useful to hit preview before save when editing.

[zappaDPJ]

 

It wasn't behaving as expected so I showed it who the boss was and it appears to have got the better of me. It's probably female

[Rik]

What do you think the S in SMF stands for.

[zappaDPJ]

 

[zappaDPJ]

OK, it's 24 hours later and this is the result. NOT what I expected at all.

This first snapshot speaks for itself. It shows what I'd expect if there was a congestion issue. Keep in mind that I've restarted my stats, hence the lack of info for the first 20 hours or so.



This is what has been recorded since.



Early this morning around 6am I did some serious downloading of which there is some evidence on the chart. I then did nothing but forum browse until around 3.00pm at which point I shut down the PC and went out. Could it be interference from an external source? That slab of doom certainly doesn't fit the exchange congestion theory.

[Bill]

Could it be interference from an external source? That slab of doom certainly doesn't fit the exchange congestion theory.

I'd expect external interference (RFI type) to show a lot more lost packets... that looks more like congestion to me.

One thought occurs- it was Friday, ~4pm to 6pm, about the time when a local business with a fast line might be backing up to remote storage, or sync'ing servers... possible?


edit- or a local IT company is backing up a lot of other people's servers... probably more likely, as congestion usually comes from people down- rather than up-loading.

[zappaDPJ]

That would make sense Bill but then it flat lines all evening whereas the previous evening I didn't have enough bandwidth to watch iPlayer. I know the BT test at over 9Mb/s indicated otherwise but I'm very sceptical about that as it took a huge amount of time to return a result. 'Best Effort Test' does seem to be the case.

One thing I am fairly sure of is that the latency goes hand in hand with throughput. At this moment in time I have very low latency and very high throughput.

[Bill]

I know the BT test at over 9Mb/s indicated otherwise but I'm very sceptical about that

You may well be right to be sceptical... I've seen suspicions from people I trust (MrSaffron on tbb for one) that the BT speedtester may bypass a lot of the systems that normal traffic has to submit to. It could well explain people getting download speeds faster than their profile, for example.

But what you can do about it is a different question

It might be worth seeing what Support can come up with, assuming they're still on speaking terms with BT . Without them I don't think you stand a hope in hell of getting to the bottom of it, tbh.

Even information about exchange traffic vs time of day & day of week would give a clue about likely congestion (at BT or IDNet level), if BT will part up with such information

[zappaDPJ]

Interesting. I'll pull a bit more data together to see if there's a pattern and get onto support. On the plus side I've not had an outage in the past few days which has allowed me to clear some of my current workload.

[zappaDPJ]

Loss of service @ 9.45am Saturday.



I don't believe I've lost sync, just DNS issues and the chart above seems to confirm something. I'm just not sure what!

[Rik]

That BT have it in for you?

[zappaDPJ]

I think it's more that they regularly pull it out to be honest 

[Rik]

They've taken up dentistry now?

[zappaDPJ]

 

[zappaDPJ]

My FTTC connection has not been able to authenticate since the initial outage on Saturday so it's been raised as a fault today.

Considering it's not in use it doesn't look too healthy to me.

[Rik]

Why, oh why, aren't Ofcom climbing all over BT?