[SOLVED] Packet loss and "roboting" in discord after upgrading to gigabit

[kuzzie]

About a week ago I had my ISP come out to install fiber lines for gigabit internet. They ran the lines fine no problem (however they are still above ground in my backyard and have yet to be buried, said someone should be out in around 14 days to bury). It has been below freezing point past few days but no "severe weather", some light rain here and there.

First day of having it installed and setup it ran completely fine no problems, at this point I had no router, just the one installed by ISP on my wall, so I was directly plugging into that, no wi-fi or anything. I purchased a xr500 Netgear pro gaming router after a day to set up all my home connections, internet seemed completely fine and stable for about a day. Late that night after purchasing my xr500 the alarm light went completely red and service was gone (on the wall "router", not the xr500), after calling my ISP and having them come out and take a look, according to them the connector from the line outside to inside the house was bad and they had to replace.

They told me light signal coming to and from the house was fine but signal inside house was bad, which seemed to be resolved after the connector switch. Internet went back up and I had a planned gaming event with a lot of friends to attend to so I went to rush back into it. At this point I immediately realized discord was being extremely robotic for me and I was getting severe packet loss in discord. I spent around 2-3 hours on Tech support line with Netgear, seeing as if I plugged directly into wall modem everything seemed fine. Tech support told me my router might have remembered a bad data connection due to fiber line being messed up temporarily, performed multiple factory resets and tweaked some settings and didn't help even slightly. Had to get off the phone with tech support due to gaming event and just played plugged into wall modem. I noticed some roboting issues in discord at this point, just nowhere near as severe as if I was plugged into xr500.

Finally I decided to return the xr500 for a new one to eliminate the chances of that specific model being messed up, and it didn't help at ALL, roboting issue still there severely, some webpages take forever to load, service seems spotty. I've been running pingplotter the past day or two trying to pinpoint whats going on, I had severe packet loss running to discord servers, twitter, and even google. However I decided to run a longer length pingplotter while plugged directly into wall modem, can post screenshots.

Any advice and or suggestions would be great.
Also if there's any IP's I need to hide on the pingplotter screenshot that would be nice to know, don't wanna accidentally give away sensitive information.

 

[helpstar]

get in touch with your ISP again, it´s more then likely that something is not right with your fiber.

 

[gggplaya]

also do www.dslreports.com/speedtest to check for buffer bloat.

Try artifically limiting your bandwidth on your PC to say 100mbps and see if the problem persists. You can change the properties on your ethernet adapter on your PC to effectively make it a 100mb adapter(Instructions Here), or set a bandwidth limited for your IP address on your router.

I'm only saying this because they might have oversold you bandwidth and somewhere down the line at a local hub(telecom's equipment not yours) there is a bottleneck. So packets are getting que'd up and causing buffer bloat. If you limit your own bandwidth to say 100mbps and all the packet loss and latency issues go away, then this is likely your problem.

 

[kuzzie]

http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest/57632127

That's what the gigabit speedtest comes up with, I noticed a high amount of upload bufferbloat in the form of ms, even though i'm not sure what that means. I will have to try artificially limiting my bandwidth and see if that does anything. I'm not using the xr500 at the moment and just the router (ont is the right term I think?) that my ISP has installed in the wall.

I'm having them come out tomorrow morning to check for general issues, but to be honest I have zero trust in my local ISP and would love to be able to at least tell them exactly the issues i'm experiencing.

 

[kuzzie]

If you could let me know what you see from that speedtest report, I would greatly appreciate it.

Edit: Reading up on bufferbloats now

 

[kuzzie]

What's strange to me is general use seems somewhat fine when plugged directly into ONT.
If I run a pingplotter test long enough on major sites like google, twitter, or discord servers I think i'm getting weird ms spikes (will post pingplotter pics). Also the high ms bufferbloat I saw on the dslreports speedtest.
Roboting in discord goes away when i'm plugged into the ONT, until more then 1-2 people are talking at once, then I get very noticeable "roboting". I can confirm with other people in the voice room at the time it was a just me issue and not discord.
However if I plug in my xr500 to the ONT and run a wire from xr500 to pc, I get noticeably slower page load times, pingplotter tests come up with extreme amounts of packet loss, any voice chat at all in discord will be completely robotic and discord will show me 50-80% packet loss in it's own debug screen. Speedtests get wonky and sometimes pages will just straight up not load for a solid 5 minutes as if the connection hiccuped for a while.

After the first time it happened with the xr500 I returned it to Best Buy and got a brand new one, fresh install and still the exact same issue. I even tried rolling back firmware to previous versions to no avail.

 

[kuzzie]

Pingplotter when plugged into the ONT ---- Pingplotter Screenshots

 

[gggplaya]

It's very possible you have a bad ONT as well, or poorly terminated fiber.

Last thing to try is limiting your bandwidth down to something you know all your hardware can handle, like 100mbps. See if you still get packet loss and latency spikes.

 

[kuzzie]

So limit the bandwidth while plugged into ONT and run pingplotter/dslspeedtest again?
Do those pingplotter screenshots look normal or is that bad, honestly can't tell because the only comparison I have is the ones when i'm plugged into xr500 and they are waaaaaaaaay worse.

 

[gggplaya]

Yes, the last few pingplotter images with you directly connected to the ONT seem normal. The XR500 images look terrible.

Yes, limit the connection bandwidth plugged directly into the ONT if you can. That will really tell us if it's buffer bloat causing issues.

Do you know what make and model your ONT unit is? We can google to see if that model has a trend of issues.

 

[kuzzie]

No idea it's a white box with Nokia on it, can send pic of it if needed. Doesn't seem to be a model number anywhere. About to limit the bandwidth.

 

[kuzzie]

All 3 of those screenshots were while directly plugged into ONT by the way.

 

[kuzzie]

Do I still hit the gigabit button on dslspeed test even though my bandwidth is limited?

 

[gggplaya]

Yes, make sure it's set to Fiber on DSL reports.

 

[kuzzie]

http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest/57634414
That's my speedtest with internet limited to 100mbps

https://imgur.com/a/g9xbNPi

View: https://imgur.com/a/g9xbNPi
This is what my ONT looks like.

 

[kuzzie]

I'm assuming this is bad ?

https://imgur.com/a/u42pMUO

View: https://imgur.com/a/u42pMUO

 

[gggplaya]

Yea, you're nowhere near the limit of your bandwidth and you still have bufferbloat while directly connected to the ONT. That means you're latency and packet loss is not caused by any kind of traffic shaping.

Either your ONT is bad or your connection is bad. I think you've done all you can do on your end(assuming you tried another computer first). Your upload latency is why you have roboting on discord, it's very high.

When the technician comes out, keep your router out of the equation and just have him hook up to the ONT directly to run tests.

 

[kuzzie]

Thank you very much for helping me out in pinpointing. I also realized that the cable that comes with the xr500 might not be a cat5e or cat6 so i'll be purchasing a cat 6 from bestbuy, partially as a sanity check and partially just to have a spare cable I know works well. I have another computer somewhere in a second room packed away, but I had zero issues with large amounts of discord and gaming use pre having the fiber gigabit installed.

 

[kuzzie]

Would you mind telling me if using a cat5 (not 5e or 6) from the xr500 to my computer would explain the problem getting MUCH MUCH worse when trying to use the xr500? That's the only part that confuses me still is why is the problem only slight with ONT and severe with xr500.

 

[kuzzie]

Like the only way I notice it when plugged into ONT is by running the dslspeedtest, everything else "seems" fine, normal use, gaming, except when i have a bunch of people talking in discord.
Then when I plug into xr500 with the cable that came with it pages load slow, packet loss goes through the roof etc.

 

[gggplaya]

I don't think it's the cable that came with the Xr500, you would just be limited to 100mb, but latency and packet loss should still not be a problem.

With latency like that, the XR500 is trying to institute it's own QOS rules that push gaming packets ahead of the rest on top of the latency and lost packets coming from the ONT. So packets tend to get que'd up and some things tend to wait longer than others. The XR500 was just all kinds of confused.

Unless the cable you're using is so bad that it's causing latency and packet loss issues, not necessarily the performance speed.

 

[kuzzie]

That makes a lot more sense, well at least I have a cat6 cable for sanity check purposes now lol.
Thank you once again for all the help! I have zero trust in ISP's and wanted to educate myself on what is going on so I can be more persistent about them fixing it. Ideally that bufferbloat ms on upload should look like my download yeah? Just wanna know what a stable dslspeedtest looks like so I can compare after they come by tomorrow.

 

[gggplaya]

Bufferbloat should be an A. It might spike at the beginning of a download or upload, but should quickly fall to just a couple milliseconds, with a few spikes here and there.

 

[kuzzie]

Thanks once again! Relieved a lot of stress on my end.