Question Packet loss only in the evening

[1 Per Coffin]

Hey everyone, im posting here as my last resort to an issue i've been having for a few months.

Every evening, starting at about 7pm, i get packet loss anywhere from 3-7%, affecting any game i play. I have had 2 techs from my ISP come out, and they said everything looked good; SNR is great, speeds and latency are good, our node isnt under a huge load, jitter is low.

I'm not super handy at this sort of thing, but we recently had a family member move in who competes in e-sports tournaments and this is affecting them, so i would like to try and remedy it. If you need additional info, please let me know.

I have replaced all the cables to the modem and router, replaced the ethernet from my desktop. Modem is a motorola mb8600. I have bought a new router (currently using an ASUS AC2900) and previously was using a tplink archer ax10. Both experienced this same problem.

We have 800mb cable internet. ISP says they dont throttle. There is 1 desktop (wired), 2 phones, 1 macbook, and 1 tv on the device list. I get the packet loss even if im just connected directly to the modem. Packet loss seems to go down upon router reboot for a short while.

Again, i dont know if any of this is useful, and if not, please let me know what i need to do testwise and ill happily do them. Thank you!

 

[Rokinamerica]

Have to say, read close, even though they say they "don't throttle", in the fine print, it may say during peak periods in specific areas or situations, they may, erm, throttle.

 

[bill001g]

You have to be careful about those "esport" types. They seem to blame everything other than their actual skill when they lose.

You need to do some more careful testing to see if you can find where the loss is. If they tested the cable to your house then it is not the simple case like dirt or water in some connection. Be sure to do all the testing on a ethernet cable wifi is very subject to random packet loss and will contaminate testing results.

I would first leave a constant ping run to 8.8.8.8. If you see no loss here then it is likely outside your ISP network. You can continue to test IP like the game company but even if you were to find say a bad router its not like you can do much about it.
If you see loss to 8.8.8.8 then run tracert 8.8.8.8. It will not likely show anything the goal is to get the ip addresses of the routers in the path. What you want to now do is start to ping various hops in the trace and find the first hop that has issues. This can be made more difficult because some routers are configured to limit response to ping to prevent denial of service attacks.

If you see loss in hop 2 that tend to be the connection between your house and the ISP. The issue might though be if the ISP comes out during the day but the problem only happens at night they may not see it. You share the connection between your house and first ISP node with all your neighbors.
If you have a neighbor who gets home from work and starts doing something it would not show up when the ISP was testing because his equipment would be off. A neighbor could have a defective modem or maybe they have other stuff hooked to the cable like moca adapters without a filter.

It could I be a bunch of neighbors using huge amounts of bandwidth that exceed the total shared bandwidth of the network segment. Normally you see large latency spikes in that case more than packet loss.

Still you need to test first to see if you can find where the problem is. Could be farther into the network and the ISP if they are not idiots might be able to check some router than has a defective interface or something but you will have to give them a clue as to which router. Again it does no good if the router is in another ISP network.

 

[Wacabletech06]

Unless you have fiber your running radio waves over metal [copper unless you paid a lot for silver wires they do exist they don't really do anything you need]. When temps change like the sun stops blaring down on the black wires, the metal moves [contracts] old fittings poorly installed pieces, etc can thus have a bad connection, when the sun comes back out and warms things they expand restoring the connection [not exactly but roughly] and thus when the tech comes out its all bueno.

Most ISP's have some historical data on the modem over say a week, a view of this [if the etech knows how, they don;t exactly train them for this] can show the events happening in the wee hours and help them pin down whether its local to you [only on your modem] the neighborhood [neighbors have same events] or larger. It is not however instant. It takes some monitoring and work to figure out especially if its outside your home.