Question High Idle Latency across all devices

[EpicCobalt]

I seem to be having very strange latency and ping issues with my Deco P9 that I cannot get to the bottom of for the life of me. I am a complete networking newbie so any insight would be appreciated. I've found that all devices connected to my network, both wireless and wired, have horrible latency issues. Idle latency through speedtest.net normally is within the 1000ms range, but can spike easily up to 2000 regardless of the time of day.

I currently have the network set up so that my modem directly connects to the first P9 which wirelessly transmits to the other two points, and I have my main office computer connected to the first Deco via Ethernet.

These are my current results with PingPlotter (which I have no idea what to interpret from this) :

https://imgur.com/AvuFsCX

View: https://i.imgur.com/AvuFsCX.png


Any help would be much appreciated in this, thank you all very much!

 

[bill001g]

That is indeed very strange latency.

It appears you have no issues to your router or in your house. The problem appears to be in the connection between your house and the ISP. Since you see no packet loss this means it is not the much more common bad wires or poor signal levels. Packet loss the ISP in the central office has tools they can test with and this tends to get fixed pretty easy.

Latency though tends to almost always be a overloaded connection. So the first thing I would do turn off the wifi radios on the main router and only plug you pc in. You can also check the resource manager network tab to be sure your PC is not transferring stuff you do not know about.
The symptom you have is what it looks like if you try to test ping times when you are doing larger downloads and using up all the bandwidth. The test data is getting queued behind the file transfer and it can cause delays.

Although it is much less common than years ago it could be a neighbor..actually multiple neighbors, all download. You share the total bandwidth on the share wire coming into your neighborhood. Generally there is plenty of bandwidth so they ISP can pretend everyone gets 1gbit or whatever rate but there really is not even a fraction of the bandwidth needed if everyone wanted to run at max rate at the same time.

The ISP generally will not admit this even if they can see it. Not it could also be something is misconfigured on your account in the ISP equipment. You will want to call the ISP. They likely can not understand the pingplotter.

What you want to do is open 2 cmd windows and run a simple constant ping command. The first to your router to show no issues and the second to the IP you see in hop 2 of the pingplot trace. Hopefully you get a tech that know more than how to read his script, this will clearly show there is a issue with the connection between your house and the first ISP node.

 

[EpicCobalt]

That is indeed very strange latency.

It appears you have no issues to your router or in your house. The problem appears to be in the connection between your house and the ISP. Since you see no packet loss this means it is not the much more common bad wires or poor signal levels. Packet loss the ISP in the central office has tools they can test with and this tends to get fixed pretty easy.

Latency though tends to almost always be a overloaded connection. So the first thing I would do turn off the wifi radios on the main router and only plug you pc in. You can also check the resource manager network tab to be sure your PC is not transferring stuff you do not know about.
The symptom you have is what it looks like if you try to test ping times when you are doing larger downloads and using up all the bandwidth. The test data is getting queued behind the file transfer and it can cause delays.

Although it is much less common than years ago it could be a neighbor..actually multiple neighbors, all download. You share the total bandwidth on the share wire coming into your neighborhood. Generally there is plenty of bandwidth so they ISP can pretend everyone gets 1gbit or whatever rate but there really is not even a fraction of the bandwidth needed if everyone wanted to run at max rate at the same time.

The ISP generally will not admit this even if they can see it. Not it could also be something is misconfigured on your account in the ISP equipment. You will want to call the ISP. They likely can not understand the pingplotter.

What you want to do is open 2 cmd windows and run a simple constant ping command. The first to your router to show no issues and the second to the IP you see in hop 2 of the pingplot trace. Hopefully you get a tech that know more than how to read his script, this will clearly show there is a issue with the connection between your house and the first ISP node.

Thank you for the reply! Would these two ping tests accurately display what is going on?:

https://imgur.com/Y22TyIK

View: https://i.imgur.com/Y22TyIK.png


I want to make sure that the problem is indeed being shown before even attempting to contact Spectrum. They tend to drag their feet so much regarding our internet.

We were also previously hit by Hurricane Ian, and damages were common around our area. Could this be causing this sort of issue, or would that be unrelated?

 

[bill001g]

I am not sure about damage causing this. I guess it could be a issue in the equipment cabinet someplace in your area.

Problem is this does not show the problem. You get little bit of latency extra here and there of about 15ms which will not hurt. You are not seeing the huge 400 or more ms like pingplotter.

Either the problem is intermittent or there is some issue that is cause pingplotter to give those results. The traffic pattern is different than simple ping commands but I am unsure what exactly is different. Hard to say. What the ISP will do at the very most is use something very similar to a ping command to the test to the modem. If a simple ping command does not see the problem their tool will not either.

 

[EpicCobalt]

I am not sure about damage causing this. I guess it could be a issue in the equipment cabinet someplace in your area.

Problem is this does not show the problem. You get little bit of latency extra here and there of about 15ms which will not hurt. You are not seeing the huge 400 or more ms like pingplotter.

Either the problem is intermittent or there is some issue that is cause pingplotter to give those results. The traffic pattern is different than simple ping commands but I am unsure what exactly is different. Hard to say. What the ISP will do at the very most is use something very similar to a ping command to the test to the modem. If a simple ping command does not see the problem their tool will not either.

Drat, that was my concern as well. Normally, our Spectrum issues where we live tend to have issues exactly when we aren't looking for them, and if we get a tech out here, the problems almost always disappear when they are here.

I went ahead and ran the ping test again to Spectrum, and I believe these are better looking results, specifically due to the timing I believe now more closely reflects PingPlotter:

https://imgur.com/3OcmkcP

View: https://i.imgur.com/3OcmkcP.png


Would this be more appropriate to bring up to them, or should I try running it when the latency feels the worst?

 

[bill001g]

Those are really bad already. In general you will see 10-15ms of delay on a cable system, fiber can be 2-3ms. 20-30ms jumps can be measurement error. More than 100ms will have a impact on games. Numbers like you have you will see even in a web browser.

I would check the modem log and see if you get lucky and see any messages at that time. The ISP can see the messages in the modem or their equipment if it was something that caused a error that the equipment detected.

Be very sure you do not have something is overloading your connection, upload tends to be easier to overload on most modern connections but even then it is quite a lot so it should be obvious which device is doing it.

This tends to be hard if it does not want to happen when the ISP is testing. I know some people only have issue outside business hours when everyone got home from work and started to use the internet, now that a lot of people work from home you see more issues during the day when the ISP can test them.