Question Packet loss with new optic fiber connection ?

[User1990]

Hey!
So I went to 1gbps up/down optic fiber from my 100/10 copper line yesterday and I've been noticing some packet loss.
In valorant for example I've been losing 80-100 packets per game.
Would these be enough to cause my game lag ?
Seems weird either way because I didn't have these issues with my 100/10 line.
Could my new ISP have different pathing or something?

Thanks!

B650 AORUS ELITE AX
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WIN 10 PRO 22H2

 

[Ralston18]

Pathing likely to be different with any ISP on any given day. And generally outside of your and your ISP's control.

Update your post to include full system hardware specs and OS information.

Run "ipconfig /all" (without quotes) via the Command Prompt. You should be able to copy and paste the full results to post here.

I would first be interested in knowing what DNS Servers were and are being used.

 

[User1990]

Pathing likely to be different with any ISP on any given day. And generally outside of your and your ISP's control.

Update your post to include full system hardware specs and OS information.

Run "ipconfig /all" (without quotes) via the Command Prompt. You should be able to copy and paste the full results to post here.

I would first be interested in knowing what DNS Servers were and are being used.

Right now I've been trying google dns but still the same overall.
Updated main post with system specs.

Host Name . . . . . . . . . . . . : DESKTOP-31U29TJ
Primary Dns Suffix . . . . . . . :
Node Type . . . . . . . . . . . . : Hybrid
IP Routing Enabled. . . . . . . . : No
WINS Proxy Enabled. . . . . . . . : No

Ethernet adapter Ethernet:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Realtek Gaming 2.5GbE Family Controller
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 74-56-3C-30-64-92
DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes
Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes
IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.3(Preferred)
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Lease Obtained. . . . . . . . . . : Friday, September 27, 2024 12:28:53 PM
Lease Expires . . . . . . . . . . : Saturday, September 28, 2024 12:28:53 PM
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1
DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1
DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 8.8.8.8
8.8.4.4
NetBIOS over Tcpip. . . . . . . . : Enabled

|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|

| WinMTR statistics |

| Host - % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |

|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|

| 192.168.1.1 - 0 | 6968 | 6968 | 0 | 0 | 28 | 0 |

| 94.131.142.254 - 1 | 6768 | 6714 | 0 | 0 | 46 | 0 |

| 10.0.6.11 - 1 | 6950 | 6945 | 0 | 3 | 81 | 1 |

| 10.0.6.102 - 1 | 6953 | 6949 | 7 | 10 | 128 | 8 |

| gooogle-d.bix.bg - 1 | 6953 | 6949 | 0 | 13 | 54 | 12 |

| 209.85.252.187 - 1 | 6952 | 6948 | 0 | 13 | 99 | 13 |

| 172.253.65.41 - 1 | 6946 | 6940 | 12 | 12 | 41 | 12 |

| dns.google - 1 | 6946 | 6940 | 12 | 12 | 42 | 12 |

|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______

https://imgur.com/a/fnI1vjD

View: https://imgur.com/a/fnI1vjD

 

[bill001g]

You have as fairly large loss in hop 2 which represents the connection to your house.

This is something your ISP needs to fix. Not sure what would cause loss on a fiber. Things like coax cable can get stuff like corrosion or water in connections fiber is pretty much immune to that.

Maybe there is a crack someplace in a fiber. The single fiber strand actually is connected to multiple houses between you and the ISP equipment at the far end of the fiber. It should be affecting multiple customers but 1% packet loss it not real noticeable unless you are playing online games.

In a way this is a best case since it tends to be the easiest to get the local connection fixed rather than something deep in a ISP network.

Not much I suspect you can do, maybe the modem shows signal levels but that would just confirm there was something off with the fiber connection. I would not do anything with the fiber it is extremely fragile just wrapping it around your finger can cause cracks.

 

[User1990]

You have as fairly large loss in hop 2 which represents the connection to your house.

This is something your ISP needs to fix. Not sure what would cause loss on a fiber. Things like coax cable can get stuff like corrosion or water in connections fiber is pretty much immune to that.

Maybe there is a crack someplace in a fiber. The single fiber strand actually is connected to multiple houses between you and the ISP equipment at the far end of the fiber. It should be affecting multiple customers but 1% packet loss it not real noticeable unless you are playing online games.

In a way this is a best case since it tends to be the easiest to get the local connection fixed rather than something deep in a ISP network.

Not much I suspect you can do, maybe the modem shows signal levels but that would just confirm there was something off with the fiber connection. I would not do anything with the fiber it is extremely fragile just wrapping it around your finger can cause cracks.

Yeah I play online games and at high competitive level too.
Contacted my ISP and they told me that they will configure some settings and that my signal looks good.
They also told me to keep monitoring it and if it keeps happening, to send an email with pictures from the programms above.

I suspected something could've gone wrong with the installation of fiber, installation is brand new(happened yesterday).
It looks a bit better after I contacted my ISP, will keep monitoring it.

 

[User1990]

You have as fairly large loss in hop 2 which represents the connection to your house.

This is something your ISP needs to fix. Not sure what would cause loss on a fiber. Things like coax cable can get stuff like corrosion or water in connections fiber is pretty much immune to that.

Maybe there is a crack someplace in a fiber. The single fiber strand actually is connected to multiple houses between you and the ISP equipment at the far end of the fiber. It should be affecting multiple customers but 1% packet loss it not real noticeable unless you are playing online games.

In a way this is a best case since it tends to be the easiest to get the local connection fixed rather than something deep in a ISP network.

Not much I suspect you can do, maybe the modem shows signal levels but that would just confirm there was something off with the fiber connection. I would not do anything with the fiber it is extremely fragile just wrapping it around your finger can cause cracks.

Having issues with fiber than I didn't have with copper is actually very sad.
I literally upgraded to have better internet for competitive games and I'm back to having packet loss.

 

[bill001g]

Fiber really has little to no advantage over most copper solutions when it comes to games. You might get a very slight latency drop but it is not enough to make a difference in a game. Most games have artificial latency inserted so that people with lower latency connection do not have a advantage. Of course if the difference is over 100ms they can't fix that.
Games only use maybe 1mbps when you play and more bandwidth is just left unused.

The main difference would be you can download the game faster...not just because it is fiber but because the plan is faster.

In my case a 1gbit fiber connection cost less money than the lowest 300mbps plan from the cable company.

 

[User1990]

Fiber really has little to no advantage over most copper solutions when it comes to games. You might get a very slight latency drop but it is not enough to make a difference in a game. Most games have artificial latency inserted so that people with lower latency connection do not have a advantage. Of course if the difference is over 100ms they can't fix that.
Games only use maybe 1mbps when you play and more bandwidth is just left unused.

The main difference would be you can download the game faster...not just because it is fiber but because the plan is faster.

In my case a 1gbit fiber connection cost less money than the lowest 300mbps plan from the cable company.

I went with 1gbps because it was the same price with 100/10 and when people were home I was lagging on 100/10 even with QOS routers and stuff.
Didn't expect a fiber connection to give me this kind of issues.

It also acts slow, if I use 100-200 mbps out of 1gbps the internet lags, is that normal ?
It literally feels like I'm on 100/10 without QOS router.

 

[bill001g]

You need to remove any kind of QoS from the router when you have a fast internet connection.

Modern routers have a feature that allows the NAT function to be done in a hardware assist bypassing the CPU. When you use QoS the cpu must see every packet and now the cpu must also do the NAT function.

This is not so much a issue on a 100mbps connection but on faster connection the small cpu in the router can not keep up. Many routers cap out at maybe 300mbps with QoS on. QoS only applies if the router must choose which packet to send when there are multiple packet waiting to be send. You never should have packets waiting on a gigabit connection anyway...if you do then you need to ask why you are overloading such a large connection.

BUT that should not be your primary concern. You show packet loss to your house. Since this is a new install it likely is something they did not test properly. Hard to say can be as simple as finger print on the end of fiber. It does not take much to reduce the levels of light from the lasers. Packet loss, especially packet loss that occurs consistently, the ISP can fix.

 

[User1990]

You need to remove any kind of QoS from the router when you have a fast internet connection.

Modern routers have a feature that allows the NAT function to be done in a hardware assist bypassing the CPU. When you use QoS the cpu must see every packet and now the cpu must also do the NAT function.

This is not so much a issue on a 100mbps connection but on faster connection the small cpu in the router can not keep up. Many routers cap out at maybe 300mbps with QoS on. QoS only applies if the router must choose which packet to send when there are multiple packet waiting to be send. You never should have packets waiting on a gigabit connection anyway...if you do then you need to ask why you are overloading such a large connection.

BUT that should not be your primary concern. You show packet loss to your house. Since this is a new install it likely is something they did not test properly. Hard to say can be as simple as finger print on the end of fiber. It does not take much to reduce the levels of light from the lasers. Packet loss, especially packet loss that occurs consistently, the ISP can fix.

I don't use QOS now, I meant it felt like when I used to have QOS on my 100/10 connection.
Well hopefully they do fix it.
They changed my private ipv4 address and I still had issues, so they started to suspect a faulty router.
They confirmed the issues themselves and I'm still waiting on a technician to come change the router and see where it leads.

 

[bill001g]

It is not likely the router itself but most of these have the optical module built into them. If the optic connection is defective in some way it can cause the issue.

The good thing is they see the issue, the bad ones are when the problem never seems to happen when the ISP is testing but happens all the time when they are not.

 

[User1990]

It is not likely the router itself but most of these have the optical module built into them. If the optic connection is defective in some way it can cause the issue.

The good thing is they see the issue, the bad ones are when the problem never seems to happen when the ISP is testing but happens all the time when they are not.

Yeah it's actually very good that they confirmed the issue.
We will probably be able to resolve it. Really hope so.

 

[User1990]

It is not likely the router itself but most of these have the optical module built into them. If the optic connection is defective in some way it can cause the issue.

The good thing is they see the issue, the bad ones are when the problem never seems to happen when the ISP is testing but happens all the time when they are not.

Most of the internal network packet loss has been solved with the new router but packet loss remains in games.
What else could it be? I see a lot of jitter on the ip's 10.0.6.102 and 10.0.6.11.
Could that be the reason or is it just bad routing to the gameservers ?

 

[bill001g]

You can't infer much from intermediate routers.

In your first case you were getting loss at all intermediate nodes including the final destination.

If you were say getting loss at just hop 2 but no loss to the final destination that would be testing error.

Routers are configured to prioritize passing data rather than responding to test ping/trace. In addition some router do not respond at all or are limited in the number of responses they will make to avoid denial of service attacks against the router using ping commands.

For a problem to be real it must start in some hop and then continue on all the rest of the hops with at least the same number of problems or likely slightly more.

Packet loss the ISP will fix, jitter is almost always load related and they will can not easily fix it. If some circuit is getting temporary over utilization they would generally have to spend money to upgrade it.

In addition the jitter has to be very large for it to affect a online game. 10 or 15ms is mostly in the range of testing inconsistently. You generally will not see jitter have much affect until it exceeds say 100ms in a game.

If you still see packet loss in the game server that will still cause issues even if it is fairly small....like a few every couple seconds or a large burst of packets in a row.

You just need to keep testing to find where the loss is and hope it is close to your house. It can actually be the game server or the game companies firewalls or load balancers.

 

[User1990]

You can't infer much from intermediate routers.

In your first case you were getting loss at all intermediate nodes including the final destination.

If you were say getting loss at just hop 2 but no loss to the final destination that would be testing error.

Routers are configured to prioritize passing data rather than responding to test ping/trace. In addition some router do not respond at all or are limited in the number of responses they will make to avoid denial of service attacks against the router using ping commands.

For a problem to be real it must start in some hop and then continue on all the rest of the hops with at least the same number of problems or likely slightly more.

Packet loss the ISP will fix, jitter is almost always load related and they will can not easily fix it. If some circuit is getting temporary over utilization they would generally have to spend money to upgrade it.

In addition the jitter has to be very large for it to affect a online game. 10 or 15ms is mostly in the range of testing inconsistently. You generally will not see jitter have much affect until it exceeds say 100ms in a game.

If you still see packet loss in the game server that will still cause issues even if it is fairly small....like a few every couple seconds or a large burst of packets in a row.

You just need to keep testing to find where the loss is and hope it is close to your house. It can actually be the game server or the game companies firewalls or load balancers.

Thank you very much for your time.
Yeah I basically still see a lot of packet loss and even if I test at the same time, I might see 0 packet loss in pingplotter/mtr and still see insane amounts of packet loss in game.

Another guy in my area installed the same ISP 2 days ago and he has the same exact issue ingame.
I feel like it is something between my ISP and the game and nothing more.

This is a very long test I had today.

https://imgur.com/a/lea2JeX

View: https://imgur.com/a/lea2JeX


This is like nothing compared to what I'm getting ingame.

 

[bill001g]

If that is your latest data it is still a issue with the fiber to your house

It is not lot but games are sending constantly so they may get a higher percentage than a tool that only sends data say a couple times a second.

It is not much loss but I tend to leave a ping run constantly. I just stopped it and it had 3 packets lost out of over 50,000 yours is much higher

 

[User1990]

If that is your latest data it is still a issue with the fiber to your house

It is not lot but games are sending constantly so they may get a higher percentage than a tool that only sends data say a couple times a second.

It is not much loss but I tend to leave a ping run constantly. I just stopped it and it had 3 packets lost out of over 50,000 yours is much higher

Yeah I also thought that games would be sending way more often and that's why the packets are dropping all the time.
Well really don't know what's next, I've sent these to my ISP.
Really wonder if it's a problem that's easily fixable or not.

 

[bill001g]

More the issue is can the ISP find the issue fixing it is not always as easy.

A fiber connection is actually much simpler than other forms of internet...assuming it is fiber all the way to the house.

All it would take is a small crack in the fiber to cause lower signal levels. There are also multiple point between you and the main fiber box in your neighborhood where your neighbors splice into the same fiber.

This is where the ISP needs to come out and test the fiber directly. Now if it is the main fiber line that has a issue those can take a while for them to get a contractor in to pull a new strand of fiber. Most have a backup strand already run but they also have to switch everyone in the path to the new fiber.

 

[User1990]

More the issue is can the ISP find the issue fixing it is not always as easy.

A fiber connection is actually much simpler than other forms of internet...assuming it is fiber all the way to the house.

All it would take is a small crack in the fiber to cause lower signal levels. There are also multiple point between you and the main fiber box in your neighborhood where your neighbors splice into the same fiber.

This is where the ISP needs to come out and test the fiber directly. Now if it is the main fiber line that has a issue those can take a while for them to get a contractor in to pull a new strand of fiber. Most have a backup strand already run but they also have to switch everyone in the path to the new fiber.

I believe it's fixable but when the ISP is trying to push the problem on the gameservers, that's where I start to lose hope tbh.
I've told them 200 times that I'm having 0 packet loss issues on my 100/10 connection and they are still trying to push the problem to the gameservers.
We've also tried a million settings on my PC and nothing helped.
On my 100/10 connection anything I put works, we can clearly see the issue is on the ISP side.

 

[bill001g]

You need to make it much more simple.

Run 2 simple ping commands one to your router and a second one to the ip in hop 2.

You show them no loss to your router which means the pc and router itself have no issues. You then show them the loss to their very first router. No game servers involved so it is hard to blame them.

You should see almost zero loss to the ISP router. The traffic rate is so low with ping commands that even a extremely small amount causes issues.

What you might also try is download some file say from steam but artificially set the bandwidth limit to about 50% of what you pay for. Then run the ping commands at the same time. This might show more loss because the ping is now mixed with all the extra data.

 

[User1990]

You need to make it much more simple.

Run 2 simple ping commands one to your router and a second one to the ip in hop 2.

You show them no loss to your router which means the pc and router itself have no issues. You then show them the loss to their very first router. No game servers involved so it is hard to blame them.

You should see almost zero loss to the ISP router. The traffic rate is so low with ping commands that even a extremely small amount causes issues.

What you might also try is download some file say from steam but artificially set the bandwidth limit to about 50% of what you pay for. Then run the ping commands at the same time. This might show more loss because the ping is now mixed with all the extra data.

I've actually tried that with the steam and the results were awfull, but that got resolved on day 2 and everything is fine even if I'm downloading now.

They changed my ip to cgnat and things look a bit better atm.
Is cgnat fine when gaming? or am I gonna have new issues too ?

https://imgur.com/a/rKPOCVf

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

 

[bill001g]

CGNAT has become more common because of the shortage/value of IP addresses.

The vast majority of people do not need their own public IP. Almost all cell phone network connection use CGNAT and nobody really has a issue.

The issue would be mostly if you wanted to host your own server like say a minecraft server. Some console based games where there is no central server might also have issues. You would have to play someone who could host the game on their console that has a public IP.

I am very surprised it made a difference. They must have had some strange issue. CGNAT is actually much more complex, you are sharing a public IP with other customers and their router must keep all the traffic seperate. With a public IP all traffic is simple routing.

 

[User1990]

CGNAT has become more common because of the shortage/value of IP addresses.

The vast majority of people do not need their own public IP. Almost all cell phone network connection use CGNAT and nobody really has a issue.

The issue would be mostly if you wanted to host your own server like say a minecraft server. Some console based games where there is no central server might also have issues. You would have to play someone who could host the game on their console that has a public IP.

I am very surprised it made a difference. They must have had some strange issue. CGNAT is actually much more complex, you are sharing a public IP with other customers and their router must keep all the traffic seperate. With a public IP all traffic is simple routing.

Yeah so if they issues don't continue I'll be fine since I don't host anything.

I'm surprised it made a difference too.
Well it's not 100% resolved yet and packet loss still exists ingame, but with a quick test everything seemed better at least and I haven't lost a single packet on my internal ipv4.

 

[User1990]

CGNAT has become more common because of the shortage/value of IP addresses.

The vast majority of people do not need their own public IP. Almost all cell phone network connection use CGNAT and nobody really has a issue.

The issue would be mostly if you wanted to host your own server like say a minecraft server. Some console based games where there is no central server might also have issues. You would have to play someone who could host the game on their console that has a public IP.

I am very surprised it made a difference. They must have had some strange issue. CGNAT is actually much more complex, you are sharing a public IP with other customers and their router must keep all the traffic seperate. With a public IP all traffic is simple routing.

It's better generally but I do get bursts of packet loss sometimes and also the network problem indicator appears.
Seems like bursts of packet loss and network jitter? Network congestion on their side maybe?

This is when pinging to google under 1 sec interval.

https://imgur.com/a/2gLapTb

View: https://imgur.com/a/2gLapTb

 

[bill001g]

This is a bit more problematic.

So first your jitter is actually very low. You compare the average to the minimum and maximum. You are much closer to the minimum number so your jitter is very low. You get some very random high spikes that likely will cause you little problems. The max is still only about 100ms. If you get a lot of them it will be detectable but in general there is so much random stuff in games you will not see a spike here and there.

The larger problem is you are still seeing packet loss. You pretty much ignore hop 3 since hop 4 does not show a issue. You would have to collect more data to be sure.

What this one show is likely a problem with the connection between your ISP and google. Google technically is a ISP because of how large they are. It is hard to say who owns what equipment and what agreements there are for traffic. You are never going to find this.

Maybe try 1.1.1.1 instead and see what you see. 1.1.1.1 is cloudflare dns.

In general you can't really fix issue this far into the network. In effect you need to get a different ISP that has better connection to other ISP. Not a realistic option for most people. Another version of getting a different ISP is to use a VPN service. This is extremely hit and miss. For a vpn to "fix?" a issue like this you need a path to the VPN server inside your ISP that has no problem AND then the VPN service must have a path to the sites you want to access that is better than your ISP. No way to predict if this will work other than trial and error. The best vpn services to consider are ones that market to gamers. These ISP have purchased private connections to the data centers that some of the major game companies host their server in. This means for that limited set of games/servers these ISP can have better performance.

A vpn really is grasping at straws. It is more used in say asia where many ISP do not pay for direct access to undersea fibers that say run to the EU or the USA where many game servers are hosted. It does in some cases work for other users but it there are no guarantees.