Question Irratic ping spikes only at night

[adams276]

- Provide us with the make and model of your router - BT Home Hub 5

• You will also need to post your ISP and connection type: BT, Ethernet
• You will also need to post the exact number of devices connected to your router (this includes tablets, smart phones, laptops, and desktop PCs) as some routers can only handle a specific number of devices at a time: Recently when i have been having issues there is 16 devices connected.
• Post any and all error messages you are getting from your ISP or Windows itself: WHen i troubleshhot my network settings Windows states that it couldn't detect my proxy settings.

I have been getting irratic ping spikes from 0 to 100+ over the last 3 weeks. It happens really randomly, but for the last 3 days i have only been getting them at night.
I contacted my isp and they were quite unhelpful, they ran a speed test and said that my speed was lower than the contracted amount. They then offered to send out a engineer but they would charge me if they belived it was my fault. They also reccomended splitting my internet into 2.5GHZ and 5GHZ but that hasn't resolved this.
I also contacted Dell (I stupidly own a Alienware PC) and they tried to resolve this as well. They updated my drivers and deleted Killer Control Center. They also reccomended port forwarding but I haven't gone any further with it because I dont want to mess with my router settings much.
Ive also contacted Epic games (the developer of the game I'm having issues with) and they sent me this link https://epicgames.helpshift.com/a/e...&f=network-connectivity-troubleshooting&p=all
I've done everything specified on the site and I'm still having problems

I've been running a few speed tests and at the moment I seem to be getting between 10 and 30mbs. I ran one on my phone earlier and i got 1mbs when i was standing in the same room as my router which is very unusal.

Also if you check out this thread on reddit https://www.reddit.com//r/FortNiteB...walking_distance_of_amazon/ef89qih/?context=3 i seemed to get some massive spikes when i ran the tracert command with my xbox running in the background. I do have fiber internet and I dont belive it should be affecting it that badly.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. If you have any advice at all please leave a comment because it's doing my head in!

Also this is my first post so i hope I've done it right.

 

[bill001g]

I see more than just me tells people to remove the killer drivers.

Time of day problems are almost always caused by other people. If it was a bug it would happen randomly and if it was just your equipment it would happen at any time. I will assume you do no have some house mate that comes home from work and starts up his torrent machine or other high bandwidth application.

I looked at that thread but I am too lazy to read all the details. From the looks of it you were running tracert but it is really bad when the ISP hides the first 2 hops. Even though 1 of your traces has those hops ?

You can try a program called pathping. It gives a little more data but it does not run long enough to catch random issues.

What you generally need to do is run the trace and then run constant ping your self to a number of the hops all at the same time. You goal is to find one that it starts in and then goes all the way to the end. A spike in a intermediate node that does not affect hops past is means little that router could have just been busy. They will delay response to ping so they do not delay actual data passing through them.

What you hope to do is to find the node where this happens. The big problem is it may not be in your ISP network and even if it is the ISP may not be willing to fix it if the problem is a connection is overloaded and it will cost them money to upgrade it.

 

[adams276]

Ok, basically I ran a tracert with my xbox on in the background and i got
4 206 ms 163 ms 128 ms 31.55.187.188
5 146 ms 159 ms 149 ms 194.72.31.168
6 193 ms 173 ms 149 ms peer2-et3-1-5.slough.ukcore.bt.net [62.172.103.222]
7 9 ms 9 ms 8 ms 109.159.253.159
For the same nodes with my xbox off i got
4 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms 31.55.187.188
5 8 ms 8 ms 8 ms 194.72.31.168
6 9 ms 11 ms 9 ms peer2-et3-1-5.slough.ukcore.bt.net [62.172.103.222]
7 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms 109.159.253.159
From what i understand there isn't any issues when you get a connection time out, it's usally a firewall blocking it

I still have the killer ethernet drivers but i don't have the command center. Currently there is only me and my Dad home. He does get back from work in the evening but today he was just doing some work on his website which wouldn't be very taxing on out internet but i was still getting spikes from 0-150.

Could you explain pathping to me in a bit more detail, I'm quite a novice at this.

 

[bill001g]

You might want to load the killer drivers with the feature removed. Killer has lots of bugs but it is more some traffic works and other does not many times. It may not be a issue at all their drivers can work fine and then microsoft will push a patch and break something again.

I would leave a constant ping run to say 8.8.8.8 on both your pc and the xbox and see if they both show corresponding pings. If both devices show issue then it is not drivers in your machine.

The problem with your trace is that hop 7 is fine. It may be pure luck but this is why tracert can not really be trusted. Lets take hop 3 which says all traffic is being blocked. If that were really true every hop past it would also be blocked. It is similar with hop 4 saying it is 206ms. If that was actually true then every hop past it would be that value or higher. Yours shows hop 7 is fine. This means the problem went away when hop 7 was being tested or hop 4 is telling lies and traffic can pass through the node with no issue but the node itself has issues.

This is why finding intermittent problems is very hard.

 

[adams276]

Sorry for the delayed response, Epic did some server maintinence and I was hoping that might have fixed the issue, unfortuantly it didn't.

I ran some ping test to 8.8.8.8 on my pc and the overal stats were:

Ping statistics for 8.8.8.8:
Packets: Sent = 100, Received = 99, Lost = 1 (1% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 9ms, Maximum = 308ms, Average = 27ms

Ping statistics for 8.8.8.8:
Packets: Sent = 100, Received = 95, Lost = 5 (5% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 9ms, Maximum = 371ms, Average = 35ms

Ping statistics for 8.8.8.8:
Packets: Sent = 100, Received = 95, Lost = 5 (5% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 9ms, Maximum = 277ms, Average = 46ms

Ping statistics for 8.8.8.8:
Packets: Sent = 100, Received = 97, Lost = 3 (3% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 9ms, Maximum = 231ms, Average = 24ms
(for this one I had a twitch stream running in the background but I have the best ping on average)

I'm fairley certain it is a problem with my network. Some of the speed tests i've ran have been below expected and i tried playing CSGO and i was getting similar ping spikes.
I don't think there is any way to do a constant ping run on Xbox. When I request detailed network statistics my latency has been between 20 and 70. I have also been getting between 2%-5% packet loss. Also my ping seems to spike more on my pc when i run the network test on my xbox.

Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=121
Request timed out.
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=57ms TTL=121
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=61ms TTL=121
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=70ms TTL=121
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=71ms TTL=121
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=73ms TTL=121
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=72ms TTL=121
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=74ms TTL=121
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=157ms TTL=121
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=131ms TTL=121

I have also randomly been getting up to 20% packet loss in game this evening yet the game ran fine up until 7pm.

 

[bill001g]

It is a pain but what you do is ping nodes in the path to ping.

You ping your router which never should show loss, and a couple other hops and the final destination.

Your goal is to find the first hop that shows the problem.

What unfortunately I strongly suspect is you will find it is hop 4. The problem is it is much more likely it is hop 2 since that is the local segment going to your house. The ISP will try to say it is not there problem.

Hop4 is owned by British Telecommunications PLC but they own huge blocks of ip so it means little. Actually hops 4-7 are all registered to BT.

If this is not your ISP then your ISP will try to claim it is not their problem. There is no way to prove them wrong because they hide all the statics from their router so they can claim anything they want.

Your end goal in all this is to show that you have no loss to your router so it can't be your equipment but at the same time you have loss to end nodes as well as loss to some intermediate hop. If it was hop 2 you could get the ISP to check the line to your house but all you can do is hope the ISP will work with you. Only the ISP really can find this problem. They have more ability to test between their equipment.................but it is going to be can you find a tech willing to help you.

 

[adams276]

I've pinged my router and it cam back perfect.
Ping statistics for ...:
Packets: Sent = 100, Received = 100, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms

To identify what hop is causing problems do I need to use the tracert command?

 

[bill001g]

Yes and no. You already did a tracert to get the nodes. It does not run long enough to find problems. I think it only send 3 pings to each node but I forget.

From you current trace you want to ping 31.55.187.188 which is hop 4. If that one is fine then go to hop 5 etc.

 

[adams276]

It came back with 100% packet loss. For node 5 i got no response as well but i got a response from 6 and 7

I also pinged 31.55.187.188 which is the 4th node for google and it came back with 100% packet loss as well. The command i did was ping 31.55.187.188 -n 15 I presume i'm doing it right

I also tried pathping as you sugested earlier and i couldn't get any info after hop 1