20+ Techs later - Intermitten packet loss

Orlando, FL with Brighthouse-Spectrum

This is beyond frustrating. After having several “high tier” techs come to the house, they all say and do the same thing. They all claim to find noise in the street and require a street tech come to clear it. I wait the 3 day time frame and the issue never goes away. So when I call again they claim they see no issue on their end.

I’m not very network smart so any help spoken as if talking to a toddler would be appreciated.

https://imgur.com/a/2umcRJh - Pingplotter data with downstream/upstream/CM error codes

This sounds like an excuse to leave without actually doing work.

Whats your testing methodology for experiencing packet loss?

I’m open to suggestions for a better testing method. Currently I run pingplotter (linked above) and notice spikes during the time frame of 11-6pm EST. Playing several different kinds of online games during this time I get constant disconnects.

Rocket League - provides high latency and packet loss warnings, constant disconnects from online play

Rocket league actually provides specific warnings when they are occuring (packet loss, high ping etc) which always correlate with my pingplotter chart going nuts (high red bars showing 50%+ packet loss and ping). I would like to note that regardless of the game played, I have the same issue.

This is with a wired connection I’m assuming? if so have you tried replacing the cable?

Also, usually (in my personal experience) if techs come out they sometimes will check your coax cable, maybe replace the end with a new one, check to see if your modem runs into a splitter (which they may also replace)

Sauce: I did lvl3 tech support for FuckCast

Your signal numbers look fine. So maybe it’s just peak time in your neighborhood?

Can you run a “ping -n 50” to get a secondary confirmation of packet loss?

Yes a wired connection. These wires at cat6 (about 6months old) and the issue happens on several wires tested.

Could it be as simple as peak time in my neighborhood? The issue usually happens between 11am-6pm and any spikes notated in pingplotter are few and far between after that time period. Am I wasting my time getting techs to come out if it is peak time issues? I find it strange that not a single tech has suggested that could be the issue.

packets: Sent = 50, Received = 50, Lost = 0 (0% lost)
Minimum = 16ms, Maximum = 26ms, Average = 18ms

Seems like the issue could be what KenPC said above, peak neighborhood times? I’m baffled at this point.

is your internet copper wired out onto a pole on the street (or underground cable) i.e is there a DSL/ADSL box that you plug both your phone landline and router into ? is it a shared connection with a landline.

Traceroute to somewhere and note the hostnames or IPs.

Run ping logs for each of the first 4-5 hops (at the same time, including your local router).

Are they all experiencing similar loss rate? If so, repeat with the next 4-5 hops…

How old is your router (ideally, make/model), and what data rate are you trying to run through it.

It’s possible it isn’t a street problem at all (just a “i wanna get out of here” response) and is actually either ISP oversubscription or your router possibly can’t keep up with the data rate.

What’s the rate of pings you’re using in ping plotter?

The signal quality/noise/correctable/uncorrectable packets look fine. Your issue looks consistent with you maxing out your upload/download bandwidth allocation and getting throttled (i.e. what else is on your network other than those pings?) … or your network segment in your neighborhood getting overloaded (typically solvable by paying extra for a higher business grade qos).

If ping plotter can do 10/20 samples per second, try that and see if numbers get more consistent. If ping plotter can’t do it, try mtr (or winmtr).

It might be possible to work around the bandwidth allocation issue by some smart network traffic scheduling/shaping/policing … getting around ISP sucking in your neighborhood is harder.

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Ethernet, near high voltage line, any microwaves, old fluorescent lights near the cable could, even be outside the address. these would be extremely intermittent to attempt to discover and even diagnose. these are the options i check when techs can’t figure it out and record everything you can. its most likely timing with other peoples devices and the noise added when people use things bringing up voltage near the cables. every detail of times of failures in connection is very important to figure these particular things out, if its high voltage sources.

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I would also go with this assumption considering you said it.was between 11 and 6pm. Is that 11am though or pm. If it is 11pm that makes a lot.of.sense as that is peak time just about everywhere in the developed world for internet slowdown. If so your ISP has over booked the service and it is nothing more than infrastructure not being able to cope with the volume of traffic.

This became a well known problem in Ireland so much so that companies started laying their own lines to avoid it and advertise that you would never get peak slow downs.