Having trouble with packet loss. It's been like this for at least 1-2 months. Who's to blame?

[RamGuy]

I'm having issues with inconsistencies in terms of packet loss. I'm hosting a dedicated TeamSpeak Server and we have noticed issues with robotic sounds, high delay/latency and hitching/skipping for a long period of time.

We did notice that some of my friends had packet loss of about 2-15% at times. But it seemed to go away, then come back again etc. We thought TeamSpeak was to blame so I replaced TeamSpeak on my server with Mumble/Murmur which seemed to work better but now we notice the same behaviour here with audio dropping, high delay/latency and packet loss.


So I decided to delve deeper into this. So I told one of my friends to download Pingplotter and point it towards my IP and see what he got. This was his result;

As you can see, the packet loss is showing at the latest hoop before it reaches my home network. At least that's how it seems to me. He lives just a few blocks away, and we have the same ISP, though he is running on COAX/DOCSIS while I'm on ONT Fibre so the connection never leaves our ISP's (Get) network.

Here you can see what I get when I run Pingplotter towards his IP;

It jumps around somewhat. It peeked as high as 50% on point nr3, and was 20% on point 4 and 5 before it lowered towards these numbers after 10-15 min.


This is what I get when I run Pingplotter towards another user living a few miles away:

As you can see, he also uses the same ISP (Get) and just like my other friend, he is running on COAX/DOCSIS while I run on ONT Fibre. There are a few addition hoops between the two of us, and on each point there is packet loss.



Judging by these numbers it looks quite clear to me that there is something fishy going on in our ISP's network as all the packet loss seems to get introduced in their chain and not on my home network or the home network of my friends.


But just to shake things up, I did the same tests using the network of my parents. We are using the same optical fibre cable as we live in the same house. They have their own termination/modem of their own so we have two separate Internet connections but it's from the very same ISP and the actual cable going into the house is the very same, but we use another fibre pair from that cable compared to them.


And this is how the first test looks using their network;

As you can see, they don't seem to have the same issue as I am? But I also notice they don't seem to go through the exact same hoops/points? As they have other IP's for each hoop/point compared to me. They all seem to be on the same subnet.


And this is how it looks from my friends towards their network;

 

[RamGuy]

It's the same thing testing towards my other friend;

How could this be? Why do I face packet loss like these, when my parents does not? I was almost certain the issue had to be our ISP, but looking at the results I get when testing on my parents network I'm not all that certain anymore. What might be the cause of the packet loss I'm facing?


The major difference between our two networks is that I got our ISP modem/router (Huawei HG8245) in bridge mode so I'm running on my Asus RT-AC5300. While they run their ISP modem/router (Huawei HG8245) as default and have a Asus RT-AC66U as access point connected to it. Our connection speed is 500/500 mbit, while theirs are 200/200 mbit.


Here is a snippet of my RT-AC5300 dashboard. The load isn't all that high so I don't see any reason why it should cause any problems.

I also did a test towards Google.com from my network which ended up looking like this;

 

[CooCooCaChoo]

Have you tried testing without 42 other clients connected? Dropped packets can also mean network congestion. I would also test with a different router to rule out the router as the cause. That particular model router you run is known to have lots of problems.

 

[RamGuy]

I'm going to fire up OPNsense on my Hyper-V Server and see how it goes using that instead of the RT-AC5300. I wasn't aware of there being many known problems with the RT-AC5300?

 

[RamGuy]

I did some more tests from work, using our two WAN connections, one behind a UTM and one which is running behind a RT-AC68U with only SPI firewall and there is no packet loss when testing towards the IP of my two friends. But when testing towards my IP I get packet loss at the two latest hoops/nodes. So it seems like the problems only occur when I'm involved.

I won't be testing without the RT-AC5300U today as I have a contact at my ISP that will do some tests today so I don't want to interrupt his testing. But I did try to disable the SPI firewall, NAT Acceleration and Spanning Tree Protocol and it didn't make any difference. Features like Adaptive QoS and TrendMicro Ai Protection has been disabled all along.

 

[RamGuy]

My ISP was to blame. They applied som magic juice and cool-aid and the packet loss was all gone.