This topic

Full Fibre 100 Inconsistency/Ping Spikes

NovaToInfinity — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 23:44:20 GMT

Hello,

I've tried to familiarise myself with some of the standard practices that help everyone identify the issues (ie. ping tests, checking router stats etc..), if I've missed anything else that I can post that will help please do let me know.

We recently had our internet 'upgraded' from a BT Infinity package to a Full Fibre 100 package with Halo 1.

Before the upgrade, internet speeds recorded on this PC were averaging about 40Mbps.

The upgrade was performed on the 3rd August (9 days now). I'm aware that there is a 'settle in' time for the internet connection to stabilise - but even the technician said this often only takes a couple of days and the reliability has shown no signs of improvement - hence this post.

The issue is that often (maybe every 5 minutes or so?), ping will spike very high (to about 200ms, or even much higher in a lot of cases) - take a look at the images below.

Another issue is that the download speed fluctuates wildly. When the upgrade was very first installed, I did a download speed test using fast.com and speedtest.net, and it showed speeds of 90Mbps. The technician said that he wasn't fully happy with the results (he said we could get higher) but that it would be a substantial improvement over the original package we had. This speed later would fall a lot - I've had cases of 420Kbps, 5Mbps etc. often.

My brother, who is slightly further away from the router than I am almost always gets speeds less than 10Mbps, whereas I often average about 20Mbps (I just ran another test just now - 37Mbps). Earlier today I reached 150Mbps for about 8 minutes before it dropped back down to 10Mbps.

As you can see this download speed is very very inconsistent (the upload speed seems to remain the same all the time I believe, at around 20Mbps).

I would appreciate any help that could assist in resolving this issue - it's very annoying when gaming to receive these ping spikes.

See below for images (the reason for the short uptime on the router is because I just did a hard factory reset - the router has not been reset before this).

Re: Full Fibre 100 Inconsistency/Ping Spikes

pippincp — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 23:46:55 GMT

Is this wireless or wired?

Re: Full Fibre 100 Inconsistency/Ping Spikes

NovaToInfinity — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 23:52:53 GMT

I'm using a wireless connection (BT's dual band dongle) to my desktop.

Re: Full Fibre 100 Inconsistency/Ping Spikes

pippincp — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 23:58:25 GMT

Can you do a wired test as that's the only one accepted due to the many things that can interfere with wireless.

Re: Full Fibre 100 Inconsistency/Ping Spikes

NovaToInfinity — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 00:08:04 GMT

I'm afraid I don't have any devices right now that I can do a wired test on - my laptop is currently broken, and the router is in a completely different room to my PC. Is there anything else you would advise?

Re: Full Fibre 100 Inconsistency/Ping Spikes

NovaToInfinity — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 00:14:23 GMT

One thing though is that the inconsistencies in both ping and DL speed are on both mine and my brothers PC.

Re: Full Fibre 100 Inconsistency/Ping Spikes

NovaToInfinity — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 13:51:47 GMT

Update: ping spikes still persist today, even up to 1500ms in some cases.

Re: Full Fibre 100 Inconsistency/Ping Spikes

NovaToInfinity — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 14:22:54 GMT

Ping spikes do not seem to happen when only my pc is connected to the network.

Re: Full Fibre 100 Inconsistency/Ping Spikes

NovaToInfinity — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 20:24:24 GMT

Hi all,

Have managed to connect a work laptop to the network via ethernet and running fast.com shows consistent speeds of 140Mbps.

Pinging google's 8.8.8.8 DNS brings very nice and low ping of around 4ms every time.

What could the issue be thats making the wireless speeds/ping so bad?

Re: Full Fibre 100 Inconsistency/Ping Spikes

pippincp — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 20:55:43 GMT

Could be any one of a whole host of different things that's why no ISP guarantees a wireless connection.

Here's a short list of the most common ones but there are many more.

The way wireless router is positioned
Physical obstacles, like walls and floors
Any other wireless appliances (baby monitors, garage door openers, etc.)
Kitchen appliances, such as microwave or fridge
Other Wi-Fi networks in the same space

Re: Full Fibre 100 Inconsistency/Ping Spikes

NovaToInfinity — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 21:05:03 GMT

Thanks for your help.

The router is located quite close to my room where my desktop pc is - it's literally in the room next door, separated by one wall. The whole house isn't huge and there's only one floor (bungalow).

See image, maybe it'll help haha:

The yellow square is a sky tv box - I doubt this would interfere much at all?

There are no other wireless appliances as far as I am aware - definitely none in between me and the router at least.

Re: Full Fibre 100 Inconsistency/Ping Spikes

NovaToInfinity — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 20:39:41 GMT

Is there anything one would advise me to do to help alleviate this problem? May consider a phone to BT soon if the issue does not correct itself, but obviously would like to try and fix the error here myself without needing an engineer.

Re: Full Fibre 100 Inconsistency/Ping Spikes

NovaToInfinity — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 20:47:41 GMT

Is this anything to do with it?

Re: Full Fibre 100 Inconsistency/Ping Spikes

pippincp — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 20:53:34 GMT

Doubt it. You could try changing wireless mode in the hub, there are 3 to choose from. Use trial and error to find the best.

Re: Full Fibre 100 Inconsistency/Ping Spikes

NovaToInfinity — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 22:27:45 GMT

I have tried changing the mode, which had no effect. I also tried changing the wifi channels to ones that weren't frequented much in my street (there's only a couple of other routers nearby anyway), which also had little to no effect. Today the ping spikes have reached an all time high, to the point where the internet was nearly unusable. I believe our house was the first on the street to receive this new package, and the technician had to reroute some new cable specifically for it - do you think the install was done so wrong? The technician even admitted on the day that the speeds weren't as high as he'd like but that they'd be faster than we had before...

Re: Full Fibre 100 Inconsistency/Ping Spikes

NovaToInfinity — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 22:31:12 GMT

Re: Full Fibre 100 Inconsistency/Ping Spikes

scottrc — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 23:12:56 GMT

Don't forget the wired test was fine. This is just a wireless problem. I live in a tiny flat and I can be 2 meters from the router connected via 2.4ghz and get a really bad connection, even though I'm on a better channel, with 2 or 3 other neighbours being picked up. I disabled 2.4ghz in the router settings and just left 5ghz enabled and it improved things a lot even though the 2.4ghz bands didn't seem that congested. If your walls between rooms are not solid, you might get better speeds doing this. Could also be the wirelesss network adapter in the PC.

Have a walk around the house and do speed tests in each room/ area, figure out where it is better/worse, then maybe see if anything else could be causing the problem. Can you do this using your mobile? Do you still get bad speeds/ping spikes if you stand right next to the router? Could be a faulty router, if you rule out everything else, but proving it to BT might be a challange. What router did you have before upgrading? Was it still the smart hub? or the home hub 6 or whatever?

You can also test the signal strength on Windows 10 of the wireless adapter using cmd:

1.Open Start.

2.Search for cmd and click the top result to open the app.

3.Type the following command to view the Wi-Fi signal strength and press Enter:

netsh wlan show interfaces

4.See the Signal field to determine the signal quality. (If the output number is equal or higher than 80, then the strength of the signal is good, anything less any you are prob going to get speeds going up and down and high pings/latency)

Try that on both PC's and see what the results are.

As you both have PC's might be worth investing in some Cat5e cable and running it along the walls or something, or second option would be to use powerline adapters and then running a Cat5e from that to your PC.

In the pingplotter software, if you get one hop that is 100% packetloss or near to it, I would just ignore it, just means that part doesn't respond to them. I know the 31. IP's are always like this, tried it myself.

Re: Full Fibre 100 Inconsistency/Ping Spikes

NovaToInfinity — Sat, 15 Aug 2020 00:38:18 GMT

Hi Scott,

Thanks for your reply.

I've tried running both computers on only 2.4ghz and only 5ghz, the results still seem to be a mixed bag. One thing I have noticed though is that when both bands are enabled, the router will often change which device is put on which band differently each day. I'm sure this is a normal occurrence, but just thought I'd mention it.

Both me and my brother's PC use the same type of network adapter (we both use the BT Dual Band dongle), and we've tried swapping dongles to no avail.

My laptop sitting on the same desk as my PC, while obtaining a better signal strength (more on that below), receives speeds of ~25Mbps and still gets the ping spikes that my desktop is receiving, which leads me to believe it's not an adapter issue.

Doing a fast.com test on my phone netted speeds of 41Mbps. I walked around my home doing a pingplotter test on the phone and found that the ping was basically the same (if a tiny bit more unstable somehow - probably just anomalous) in the bedroom where the router is than in the room where my PC is.

One thing worth noting, however is that the pings received on my phone are much better than on my PC. Although this isn't always the case, at the moment there are no spikes on my phone and it's averaging 10ms. My PC, running tests at the same time, is averaging 77ms which lots of spikes up to 200ms. (maybe due to being on different bands ?)

The router we had before was a Home Hub 4 (we were on BT Infinity) and received speeds on average of 44Mbps then. There were very little ping spikes at the time, but the router was located in a different room (in the floor plan I posted earlier, the router was situated in the room below mine, roughly in the centre left of the room - about the same distance as the current router is now to my pc, but a further distance for my brother).

One thing which might be an issue is that the current router is located on the windowsill of a big window (can provide pictures if needed) - is there a chance that some of the signal is simply being scattered out onto the street rather than off of a wall and into our house? (unsure if this is how WiFi signals operate haha)

The signal strength tests were as follows:

BROTHER'S PC:

2.4ghz: 66%
5ghz: 60%

MY PC:

2.4ghz: 85%
5ghz: 78%

The laptop received 90%.

I would love to have ethernet running from the router to my PC, but it would be quite unsightly as it would have to be run down the full length hallway into both of our rooms. I'm also unsold on powerline as I've heard mixed results about the connection quality, especially seeing as the house is not new and the quality of the cabling may affect the speeds.

Likewise I'm not too worried about the pingloss on the 31.xxx.xxx.xxx IP, I'm aware that some routers filter out ICMP requests as they're 'low priority', but find it a bit worrying that the packetloss for the IP for our router is around 50%. Guessing the same priority cancellation is going on here?

Re: Full Fibre 100 Inconsistency/Ping Spikes

scottrc — Sat, 15 Aug 2020 04:59:14 GMT

I get the same packetloss using the same program, pretty sure it's just the router rejecting the ICMP requests. The smart hub two has 7 internal antennas, so really the signal will go everywhere, the whole 360 degrees and is one of the best I think. There is def some kind of interference going on if your phone only gets 40 odd down also. If you still get bad speeds, literally standing next to your router, then upgrading anything WiFi related is prob not worth it unless the router itself is faulty, as you will always get some latency as there is clearly intereference from somewhere.

You could try contacting BT via the live chat, explain that standing next to the router gives bad WiFi speeds and that the router might be faulty, they may be willing to send a replacement. It's unlikely to be the cause though I think and without the expensive equipment engineers use to measure interference, it's hard to pin down. Or if you have the dosh, you could get the mesh system.

Personally I think it's the USB dongles and I would go for the lan powerline adapters rather than trying to use Wifi extenders or dongles, the newer models have solved a lot of the older problems that you see in some articles HomePlus AV2 or even better G.hn is the latest formats I think, then it goes up by speeds, but real world speeds are usually nowhere near what is advertised and it does depend on circuits etc. Just make sure to research the real world speeds of each make if you do decide on getting them as you want at least 100mb. Can always return them if it doesn't work out. However like you said, if your wiring is bad, it might not work as well as you hoped, but the wiring would have to be pretty messed up I would of thought in a bungalow. Trouble is, the good ones are expensive. But if you do get a good connection, then you will have less latency when gaming.

I wouldn't rate USB WiFi dongles purely because most have no antennas. Even if you get one with antennas or a PCI based one I would of thought the latency would still be worse than a good working lan powerline adapter. I think the latest powerline adapter with G.hn are really good, according to reviews anyway.

The fact that you said it sometimes switches from 2.4 to 5ghz on it's own, means the smart hub must be detecting interference or low signal and is trying different bands. The new smart hub 2 uses beam forming so getting a decent USB wifi dongle with beam forming and an antenna would prob pair well with it. I expect those BT dongles you have are struggling with the new smart hub in some way or another and your signal results show that, BT also don't sell them anymore, must be a reason why. Think they want you to use the WiFi discs now.

So really three choices, try for a new router. Get a G.hn rated or really good powerline adapter and hope the wiring works out. Or try a WiFi dongle with antenna and beam forming such as the TP-Link Archer T9UH AC1900.

Oh or of course you could get the BT Wifi Disc extenders, but straight up ethernet is always going to be the best.

Re: Full Fibre 100 Inconsistency/Ping Spikes

scottrc — Sat, 15 Aug 2020 04:36:50 GMT

I had another look at the floor plan you posted and actually you do kind of have an outside brick wall between you and the router now. Moving the router to the complete left side corner of the room, might actually give you better signal and with the newer beam forming dongles, would help a bit.