Zen/Cityfibre latency and dropped packets

m-holland

Hey folks,

can anyone advise if this BQM is unusual for a Zen Internet (on CityFibre) connection?

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality/share/409e048e541fbe65b984d908c34e7f447b3e1984-29-09-2022.png

Neil_Jones

The dropped packets (at around 2pm) may have just been internet congestion.  Happens sometimes.

The packet loss... well unless you were using the computer you wouldn't have noticed.

Too many variables, but the FAQ has a description of a sample BQM that isn't too different from yours:

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/faq/broadband-quality-monitor

Must be noted that these BQM are generated based on the result of a ping back from whichever device at your end (typically the router) is responding.  Doesn't necessarily mean there is a problem with your connection.

forgotmyname

Select different servers are your likely to get different results. Not only are you testing your connection your also testing the connection
of the server giving you the information. Maybe they had a massive spike in users testing hence the packet drop?

AstonSmith

forgotmyname said:

Select different servers are your likely to get different results. Not only are you testing your connection your also testing the connection
of the server giving you the information. Maybe they had a massive spike in users testing hence the packet drop?

It's not a speed test, it's a FireBrick sending out regular pings to the router (probably) at the other end to measure its response time. You don't get to choose a server. Pings are very small data-wise, and the number of users is relatively consistent.

I've had a TBB BQM running on my connection for years, and whenever I see those red spikes, it usually means the connection was lost for a moment (PPP drop, modem resync, etc). The rest of the BQM looks reasonably normal to me.

[Deleted User]

I'd say that isn't normal at all, you shouldn't get any pack loss of that degree over a typical day. Your connection looks fairly quiet throughout the day, ping times are consistent and not spiking during the packet loss which I'd expect to see. It is finding out where the packet loss is happening and why that is tricky.

I'm using the worst broadband provider (if you believe all the comments made on this forum about Virgin Media) and I get zero packet loss on a typical day.



I also have a PRTG monitoring server running 24/7 at home sending outgoing pings to monitor my connection, pinging some of my own websites, employers' servers as well a Google server to get a baseline. It isn't as aggressive as the Thinkbroadband BQM at 1 ping per second, I send 5 pings every 30 seconds at 5ms intervals, and the results are the same.

In this example below I'm pinging my employers' VDI gateway server - 1 packet was lost in the whole 48-hour period - that is 1 out of 28,800 packets sent out (0.003%). The timeout is set at 2 seconds.




The only time I do see incoming packet loss is when I saturate my connection doing a hefty download, in the example below one of my servers was downloading a huge amount of data at around 550Mb/s from midnight to 2 am. You can see the ping times affected by this as well.


That is quite normal, routers typically deprioritise ICMP traffic and it will be the first to be dropped if there is excess traffic.

m-holland

thank you everybody, i might contact zen and see what they say. I was worried that i was seeing some packet loss on a new cityfibre connection