[SOLVED] Major outbound packet loss

[rtwilliam]

Xfinity is my ISP, I've got cable internet clocked in @ 200Mbps down w/ 10Mbps up. I've had multiple techs from Xfinity come and tell me everything is perfectly fine in my apartment -- that my connection is flawless, and that there's literally nothing they can do to fix the problem.

My internet inconsistently has periods where I'll have up to 60% outbound packet loss (in the form of dropped or late packets) on VALORANT, I'll turn into R2D2 on Discord, and there's nothing I can find to explain it all. I need help diagnosing the issue so I can figure out what steps I need to take to completely rectify this problem. I'll leave as much information as I can think of here that can be of assistance, but please feel free to ask me for anything.

modem: Netgear CM500 w/ DOCSIS 3.0
router: Netgear R6230
connected via ethernet

speedtest (to comcast): https://www.speedtest.net/result/12163268974

Funny enough, I was about to upload some PingPlotter results pinging to google.com and a couple runs from https://packetlosstest.com to show some of the poor performance I'm experiencing (because it's been going on for about 12 hours straight now), but now that I'm going through the process of writing up this thread, and I'm gathering some results to screenshot, my internet is running like a dream. No conditions have changed in my home all day -- it's been the same level of congestion (me, on the computer, and occasionally looking at my phone).

Anyway, here's what the good results look like. I took some recordings of some poor packet loss experience I'm running into on Valorant -- I'll upload it tomorrow along with screenshots of any poor test results I come up with.

pingplotter:

https://imgur.com/pdm2Do4

View: https://i.imgur.com/pdm2Do4.png

packetlosstest.com:

https://imgur.com/v2ZFmG4

View: https://i.imgur.com/v2ZFmG4.png
(settings: overwatch preset @ 60sec runtime)

Again, the results I'm posting above are perfect, and if it were consistent I'd have zero complaints. Just an hour earlier on the packetlosstest.com test my poor test results would have approximately 5% DL packet loss, 10% late packets, for 15% total packet loss, and I zero idea why.

Thanks early for any suggestions and/or insight. I really appreciate it.

 

[bill001g]

Intermittent problems are always the hardest to find.

Your best bet is to make your own pingplotter you can run constantly. Open a number of command windows and leave constant ping commands run in the background. You can do all the hops if you really want but the only ones you can do much about are hop 1 (your router) and hop 2 (the connection between the ISP and your house).

So I would leave ping run to hop 1 and hop2 as well as some common ip like 8.8.8.8 When you see issues in the game quickly swap over and see if you see corresponding issues.

For some reason ping plotter is showing loss to your router but this has to be false since it you would also see loss in packets that pass through the router for other destinations. To be real you would see loss in every hop at the same time.

The most common cause of this is some problem with the cabling between your house and the ISP. Check the signal levels in your modem to see if the are withing a acceptable range. Many modems also show things like uncorrectable errors, these will be packet loss. You will always see some but key is to see if these numbers change much.

 

[rtwilliam]

Intermittent problems are always the hardest to find.

Your best bet is to make your own pingplotter you can run constantly. Open a number of command windows and leave constant ping commands run in the background. You can do all the hops if you really want but the only ones you can do much about are hop 1 (your router) and hop 2 (the connection between the ISP and your house).

So I would leave ping run to hop 1 and hop2 as well as some common ip like 8.8.8.8 When you see issues in the game quickly swap over and see if you see corresponding issues.

For some reason ping plotter is showing loss to your router but this has to be false since it you would also see loss in packets that pass through the router for other destinations. To be real you would see loss in every hop at the same time.

The most common cause of this is some problem with the cabling between your house and the ISP. Check the signal levels in your modem to see if the are withing a acceptable range. Many modems also show things like uncorrectable errors, these will be packet loss. You will always see some but key is to see if these numbers change much.

I've only had PingPlotter installed for the past 12 hours or so, what do you mean by "I would leave ping run to hop 1 and hop2?" And yeah, I interpreted the routerlogin.com PL% as bogus, but I don't have a clue why it's doing that.

For "Check the signal levels in your modem to see if the are withing a acceptable range," how would I go about doing that? What is classified as an acceptable range, and where would I see these signal levels?

edit:

new pingplotter (to 8.8.8.8):

https://imgur.com/0YF8v3Q

View: https://i.imgur.com/0YF8v3Q.png

new packetlosstest.com test:

https://imgur.com/07I0OX9

View: https://i.imgur.com/07I0OX9.png

(settings: overwatch preset ran for 60secs)

The results weren't as bad as I got last night, but it's still not great. Any advice outside of getting a new line ran? It's doable, I just wonder if it's something else.

 

[bill001g]

I don't know where you see it in the device you need to search around or read the manual.

The recommended values vary a bit based on the type of docsis you are running. The tables are pretty big so I did not want to just copy and paste them. You will have no trouble finding the recommended values by searching google.

Don't use pingplotter use a actual ping command.

 

[rtwilliam]

Gotcha, I'll do that. Just as a reference I left an edit in my previous post with a new PingPlotter test to 8.8.8.8 and a packetlosstest.com results page. I'll run the ping command and check out the information for my modem.

 

[bill001g]

The pingplotter is show issues with your connection to the ISP and pretty much consistent errors all the way to the end. This pretty much proves there is a issue with the ISP connection but the tech will likely not understand pingplotter, you have to hope they understand normal ping. What you hope is you can show no loss to your router IP but loss to hop 2. If nothing else just show them the loss to hop 2.

 

[rtwilliam]

Thanks for the info. I've got a technician coming out Tuesday that I'll give the information to, and I'll update this thread as things happen.