Question Best router / modem for Spectrum 1 D / 40 U

[ThunderMS34]

So Ive had problems with upload speeds between noon and 530-630 daily while streaming to Twitch FiveM and it kind of ruins the immersion. But I called Spectrum internet and they checked logs and everything but couldnt find an issue of dropping or anything.

I'm not even 100% positive if it is my internet but it's gotta be right? My phone even starts to act slow connected to wifi around same time aswell and upload speed went from 40mbps to 5 when I noticed the dropped frames on my OBS.

I have whatever the Spectrum technician installed earlier this year so its not like the equipment is too old.

Im not sure if I need a different modem or a different router or both and how I'd go about setting them up.

 

[ThunderMS34]

My router is the SAX1V1R and the modem is ET2251

 

[bill001g]

Time of day issues tend to be other peoples traffic competing with yours. We will assume it is not inside your house so this likely means it is one or more of your neighbors. This is not a very common issue now days the bandwidth you share with neighbors is huge..many times at least 2.5g if not 10gbit the upload speed tends to be 1gbit. It would have to be multiple neighbors doing something crazy at exactly the same time.

What I would more suspect is you are getting packet loss.

First I will assume you are not testing on wifi. That is subject to interference and you can get random issues.

I know nothing about that router. It is unlikely the router is the issue ethernet is pretty simple and unless you were doing some QoS or firewall stuff on the router the router does very little other than NAT and that is done with a hardware assist. Even low end routers can do 1gbit and higher end ones can actually really do 10gbit.

What I would try first is test directly plugged into the modem. You likely will have to reboot the modem every time you change what you plug into it. This should eliminate the router as the cause but it would be highly unlikely a router would have issue at the same time every day problems tend to be random. You do this test more to expedite your call to the ISP and them trying to have your reboot routers etc etc.

If you see issues with the modem connected I would check the logs in the modem. A very common IP to access the modem is 192.168.100.1 but I am not 100% sure on your modem. You likely also can find the signal levels and many a screen that shows packet errors. This is doing the ISP job for them. You can find the recommended levels if you search. They vary a bit depending what type of docsis encoding the ISP is using where you live.

So if this still shows nothing I would do the standard let a constant ping run to 8.8.8.8. Maybe you see packet loss. Bad signal levels will also cause packet loss. If you see loss I would call the ISP. Without the router in the path there is not much other than their equipment that can cause the loss. If they are idiots and try to blame google 8.8.8.8 then you need to do tracert and ping their router instead but I have never heard of a issue ever with a ping to 8.8.8.8 since it is not one server it is duplicated in many cities so if one has issue another takes over.

 

[ThunderMS34]

Time of day issues tend to be other peoples traffic competing with yours. We will assume it is not inside your house so this likely means it is one or more of your neighbors. This is not a very common issue now days the bandwidth you share with neighbors is huge..many times at least 2.5g if not 10gbit the upload speed tends to be 1gbit. It would have to be multiple neighbors doing something crazy at exactly the same time.

What I would more suspect is you are getting packet loss.

First I will assume you are not testing on wifi. That is subject to interference and you can get random issues.

I know nothing about that router. It is unlikely the router is the issue ethernet is pretty simple and unless you were doing some QoS or firewall stuff on the router the router does very little other than NAT and that is done with a hardware assist. Even low end routers can do 1gbit and higher end ones can actually really do 10gbit.

What I would try first is test directly plugged into the modem. You likely will have to reboot the modem every time you change what you plug into it. This should eliminate the router as the cause but it would be highly unlikely a router would have issue at the same time every day problems tend to be random. You do this test more to expedite your call to the ISP and them trying to have your reboot routers etc etc.

If you see issues with the modem connected I would check the logs in the modem. A very common IP to access the modem is 192.168.100.1 but I am not 100% sure on your modem. You likely also can find the signal levels and many a screen that shows packet errors. This is doing the ISP job for them. You can find the recommended levels if you search. They vary a bit depending what type of docsis encoding the ISP is using where you live.

So if this still shows nothing I would do the standard let a constant ping run to 8.8.8.8. Maybe you see packet loss. Bad signal levels will also cause packet loss. If you see loss I would call the ISP. Without the router in the path there is not much other than their equipment that can cause the loss. If they are idiots and try to blame google 8.8.8.8 then you need to do tracert and ping their router instead but I have never heard of a issue ever with a ping to 8.8.8.8 since it is not one server it is duplicated in many cities so if one has issue another takes over.

What kind of router would you reccomend for Spectrum Internet? I ended up getting a Motorola MB8611 modem in hopes of fixing the intermittent internet problems between Noon-6pm on a daily basis dropping frames on my livestreams to twitch, but that didnt seem to fix anything. I'm not sure if it's my router / Spectrum or what at this point.

I even tried the ping -n 100 1.1.1.1 and ping -n 100 8.8.8.8 at the time I was dropping frames and ran speed test on both Spectrum's website and the speed test on Ookala and it showed normal no packet loss drops but my OBS was showing red bar and dropping frames like crazy...

Could it also be my PC? I couldnt imagine it could be that at all but
Ive got a
Asus TUF Gaming OC 4090
MSI MAG Z690 Tomahawk WiFi
i7-12700k
Crucial Ballistix 3600mhz CL16 ddr4 (2x32) 64GB
and I have a 1300W MSI MEG PSU
if that matters at all.

And bitrate in OBS is set to 4500

I'm getting 40mbps upload when it's looking "normal" "good"

 

[BFG-9000]

Both ET2251 and MB8611 are 32x8 modems so have the same nice and wide connection to Spectrum. SAX1V1R is Spectrum's router which has very few user-configurable options, pretty much just as if you had a modem-router combo unit.

The problem is as with most cable ISPs, Spectum oversold the bandwidth available by their infrastructure to too many customers so at peak times your connection will be limited. Surely you have read this in reviews of Charter/Spectrum internet?

This used to cause severe ping issues as the memory buffers in all equipment filled up with delayed packets, unless you had a router that could reduce bufferbloat with an AQM QoS like CAKE, but DOCSIS 3.1 modems include a rudimentary form of this called PIE which seems to work pretty well all by itself. To the extent that at busy times you should mostly only see reduced bandwidth nowadays with ping <10ms. You can still improve latency further using a router with CAKE or fq_CoDel, but that's usually not going to be possible with 1Gbit downloads on consumer hardware--however it can be applied to only uploads if (as is common with cable internet) there is only a latency issue with uploads, and just about anything can run QoS at 40Mbps.

That doesn't help with your bandwidth issue though. The only solution to that is another ISP that hasn't been as oversold yet. Good luck with that as the 5G wireless providers are even worse.

 

[bill001g]

In general if ping does not show any issues then the problem is with the application or your computer in some way. Note it is not just packet loss you are looking for in the ping commands. If you see very large spikes in the latency....like over 200ms at least..that might cause enough delay for some application to have issues. Something that large tends to cause issues with games not sure about streaming data since it can hide a lot with buffers. If you see the fairly standard 10-20ms spikes then the ping commands say there is not a network issue.

Now theoretically there could be some difference in the path going to the servers that have issues and the servers you are running ping to. You really hope this is not the case because you can't really fix it anyway since it is related to how different ISP are interconnected and not something in your control.

These are really hard because it can pretty much be anything on your computer that can cause delays. Things like video encoding are extremely data intensive. Maybe something like the resource manager might show something that has high utilization. This gets very messy because you can not generally tell if a single cpu core running at 100% means anything when there are other cores that are still available.

 

[ThunderMS34]

In general if ping does not show any issues then the problem is with the application or your computer in some way. Note it is not just packet loss you are looking for in the ping commands. If you see very large spikes in the latency....like over 200ms at least..that might cause enough delay for some application to have issues. Something that large tends to cause issues with games not sure about streaming data since it can hide a lot with buffers. If you see the fairly standard 10-20ms spikes then the ping commands say there is not a network issue.

Now theoretically there could be some difference in the path going to the servers that have issues and the servers you are running ping to. You really hope this is not the case because you can't really fix it anyway since it is related to how different ISP are interconnected and not something in your control.

These are really hard because it can pretty much be anything on your computer that can cause delays. Things like video encoding are extremely data intensive. Maybe something like the resource manager might show something that has high utilization. This gets very messy because you can not generally tell if a single cpu core running at 100% means anything when there are other cores that are still available.

I was having unusual spikes tonight in iRacing with no other applications open except for the Logitech GHub, Heusinkveld pedal software, trading paints and iRacing itself. I never have had spikes like tonight. And my Spectrum router light has been blinking red for I have no idea how long.