Spiky Internet

[Deleted]

Probably about time I posted here as this has been going on for around 2 months now.

Recently my internet has been really spiky, even when it's 'good', it'll freeze up for around 0.5s every 5-10s which, while it's not the end of the world, it's still pretty annoying and a performance decrease while raiding and makes more reaction based games (ie League) pretty much unplayable.

Running a speed test while it's good usually results in around 20ms, 50 down and 16 up.

Other times it'll be awful. Speedtests will say <5 down and ~5 up and the ping will range anything between 50 and 800ms. In WoW, I'll be on 1k-5k ms.

Small thing to note about the speedtests, I live in England but the site shows I'm in Ireland and connects me to an Irish server. This doesn't make a noticeable difference in speeds though and gives me similar results to if I test a local server.

I use wireless but, while it's running slowly, if I plug a laptop in to the router I'll still get awful speeds, so I'm pretty sure it's not a wireless issue. Similarly, I'll get problems even if I'm the only person connected. I also tried swapping the cables that connect the router to the modem and the modem to the wall.

Any help would be much appreciated and feel free to ask for more info. Really want to get this sorted before looking for a new guild and to start playing League.

[Deleted]

Anyone else in house using internet or any torrent apps left running you forgot about that might auto run at startup?

[Deleted]

Nope, nothing like that. Also been keeping an eye on resource monitor and it doesn't seem like there's any other processes running that could be causing a problem.

There often are others in the house using the internet, but there's no real correlation with the internet problems. Sometimes it'll start being awful with no one else connected and sometimes it's fine (always spiky though) when there's others using it.

[Perfectdoll]

...Out of idle curiousity, based on a friend's sudden 'aha!' moment the other day, do you have any console gaming system that also connects to the 'net? It could be that they're pulling on your bandwidth for updates and such?

[Deleted]

IT could be your internet provider. I was on talk talk for a while and the internet was pretty much unusable through the day. 1/10th download speeds and not even able to watch youtube without buffering all through the day until after 10pm.

Since i switched to BT there is no slowdown/throttling through the day and i get lag free browsing and full HD youtube non stop never buffering. Both providers supposedly providing the same speeds into house but Talk Talk was a throttling piece of shit for 3/4 of the day while most other providers dont do that any more.

[Deleted]

Oh, something I realised I totally missed, when it's really bad, resetting the router sorts the issue, although even then it still has those 0.5s spikes.

Also I'm on BT. It doesn't seem like a throttling issue because it'll be at random times and resetting the router temporarily solves it. Not to mention those frequent small spikes even when it is working 'fine'. Also, the spikes are more frequent/noticeable if I use skype or something, when really that shouldn't have a noticeable affect on my internet.

[Djinni]

If you don't already have one, ask BT to fit a REIN filter on your main socket.
Make sure that every telephone socket has a micro-filter on it.

Have you tried doing a full factory reset on the router to see what mileage that gives you? BT have been known for pushing out dodgy updates to their routers.

[Lathais]

Oh, something I realised I totally missed, when it's really bad, resetting the router sorts the issue, although even then it still has those 0.5s spikes.

Also I'm on BT. It doesn't seem like a throttling issue because it'll be at random times and resetting the router temporarily solves it. Not to mention those frequent small spikes even when it is working 'fine'. Also, the spikes are more frequent/noticeable if I use skype or something, when really that shouldn't have a noticeable affect on my internet.

What router and how old is it? If resetting it fixes the problem, it may have something to do with it. If it is a good one and still fairly new, maybe do a factory rest and see what happens?

[Deleted]

Got the REIN filter and it's the BT Home Hub 3 we got when we upgraded to BT Infinity either 2 or 3 and a half years ago. I'll give a factory reset a go.

Thanks for the help so far.

[Djinni]

Shouldn't you be on a Hub5 with Infinity?

[jimlow]

I had the same thing with Comcast at one point. I had some sort of BLAST high speed internet BS. What I found out that actually was was some goofy form of packet encapsulation. This is where it would que up a bunch of packets and then send them all at once and while it worked fine for netfilx and your typical web browsing it was hell on any sort of live gaming environment. Wow, LOL, any FPS. would have huge lag spikes constantly.

They did this so they could sell it as a higher data speed pipe and have "faster" speeds but it was all BS. I got rid of the blast package and it was fine on normal internet.

[Deleted]

Okay, done the factory reset earlier and so far it all seems to be working great.

The BT Home Hub 3 was the most recent one when I upgraded and it is Infinity compatible if that's what you were wondering. Maybe it's just the pessimist in me, but I'm expecting it to fall apart again soonish, so I'll look into getting the newer model.

Thanks for the help guys.

[Rhyseh]

The issue will probably return. When it does, replace the router with a well supported unit.

[Deleted]

The issue will probably return. When it does, replace the router with a well supported unit.

Exactly what I'm thinking, will look into it before it the problem comes back.