High Jitter Fiber Internet with GigaHub

[AntoineP]

Hello,

Not sure where to get help as the phone representative put the blame on me, but I've been experiencing lag in video games for quite a while now. While not isolated, I play mostly Rocket League.

Traceroutes are clearly showing issues on a couple of Bell's hops after the packets leave my house. In my case it seems to be the 3 following IPs showing latency spiking every 5-10 seconds... (See PingPlotter screenshot) 

- 142.124.35.16
- 64.230.38.184
- 142.124.127

This is happening everyday, it's a little better in the morning, but gets worst in the evening. BufferBloat tests are inconsistent, I've gotten from A to F. I think it shows the inconsistency of Bell's network.

This is on pure fiber 500up and down wired from PC to Router with nothing in between. It is not my home network or PC as shown with the very constant latency on my home network (192.168.2.1)

Anyways, hoping someone can help... Thank you in advance.

[dks]

Thanks for your inquiry. Unfortunately only Bell staff can make posted images visible. It is also worth noting that singular examples of higher ping can have many causes, often beyond the control of Bell. Gaming can be especially sensitive to these issues. 

[AntoineP]

Hi, appreciate the response.

However, as stated in the original post, this has been happening for quite a while now, more precisely a couple of months. The screenshot shows a 10 minutes lapse with multiple instances of jitter. This is not a single instance of lag, it's all day everyday and even more intense in the evening and night, if there is a better way to post the graphs with pingplotter, let me know. 

In the meantime, here's a WinMTR table. Since it can't be visualize over time in WinMTR, I'll just say that the worst column happens every 20ish seconds.

|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| WinMTR statistics |
| Host - % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
| mynetwork.home - 9 | 824 | 750 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| 142.124.35.16 - 0 | 1462 | 1462 | 1 | 3 | 45 | 12 |
| No response from host - 100 | 149 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| No response from host - 100 | 149 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 64.230.38.190 - 0 | 1462 | 1462 | 2 | 4 | 23 | 5 |
| 142.124.126.255 - 0 | 1462 | 1462 | 1 | 3 | 46 | 5 |
| No response from host - 100 | 149 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| No response from host - 100 | 149 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| No response from host - 100 | 149 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| No response from host - 100 | 149 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| No response from host - 100 | 149 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| No response from host - 100 | 149 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| No response from host - 100 | 149 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| No response from host - 100 | 149 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
|ec2-3-237-149-200.compute-1.amazonaws.com - 0 | 1462 | 1462 | 15 | 15 | 24 | 16 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|

[dks]

For clarification, is this your own router behind a Bell hub?  Or through the Bell hub? And which hub do you have? 

[AntoineP]

This is through the Bell "Home Hub 4000/Giga Hub", nothing else in between. PC to Hub wired in the 10G blue port. If I ping my router, I get constant sub 1ms latency, so my home network is good. This combined with traceroutes showing the same IPs always spiking is leading me to think this is an issue happening after the packets are leaving my house.

Not sure if I'm allowed, but here's an Imgur upload of the graph posted in the original post, showing latency spikes all the way up to 60ms at one point. I understand that comparing that to other connections might seem like 60ms is not alot, but with an average ms of 4ms, this shows a 56ms variance every couple of seconds. The image shows a trace route to a Rocket League server.

As to showing a real life impact of this, Rocket League runs at 60ticks a second, meaning 60 packets every 1000ms, a packet every 16.6ms. Any packet delayed above 33ms is 2 entire frame skipped for the game, per the graph that happens every couple of seconds over the 3 Bell hops. It makes the game very frustrating to play.

[Vanadiel]

ICMP is not a good method of measuring network performance, because routing points will lower ICMP priorities based on the load they experience.

What you see, might not be reality but a result of lower priority response time of the routing points.

That being said, even those results are within good range for online gaming.

You are still within the gold standard for ping times, and you have very low average jitter with no packet loss.

[AntoineP]

Hi @Vanadiel, appreciate the response.

UDP packet tests in PingPlotter show the same results as ICMP, but unfortunately I don't seem to be allowed to post logs in the form of documents or pictures. Even the in graphs in the game is showing a fluctuating packet intake. On top of that, Wireshark also shows the actual real packets being delayed during a game. This is not an ICMP issue. Perhaps there is a way to get my game packets prioritized through some router settings? The Bell hub seems quite barebone in that area though.

As to acceptable or not, I guess that's subjective, but to me it is not acceptable as it translates into very real issues in game. Furthermore, the upper range of acceptable jitter for gaming or VOIP applications is about 30ms. My logs are showing that I can't go 5 minutes without a 40-60ms spike. This is an ongoing issue whenever packets hop through Bell infrastructure at the IPs I provided.

I doubt Bell will acknowledge the issue or do anything about it, but I'm looking for a solution. Can I request bell to change my routing? Maybe different servers would show better stability.

Again, I appreciate the help, I know you're coming from a good place, but this is an issue. 

[dks]

Thank you for your question. Bell does not make any guarantee or warranty any quality of connection in their residential internet service. The only way to change your routing is to reboot your Giga Hub and you might get a new IP with different routing, or you may not. You might also try using the 1 GB port on your hub and not the 10 Gb port, especially if your have a 500/500 Mbps service. 

[Vanadiel]

I think you are confusing ping with jitter. If you look at ping plotter, your jitter is 3.4 at highest, which shows a consistent network performance over time.

The tick rate related to games is not how many packets per second the server is sending. The tick rate is divided between server and client tick rate, and is the number of times per second the server/client update the game. It's set to avoid providing those with very low latency connections to have an advantage over those with higher latency connections. 

It evens out the playing field from a network perspective.

tick rate 

You should not be experiencing gaming issues with the connection, based on the ping plotter data.

What is important to network connections for gaming is consistency of packet transfer, which is measured as jitter, and things like the absence of dropped packets.

Occasional spikes are less important than consistency.

[AntoineP]

Hi, these are not "Occasional spikes" they are spikes happening constantly on a 1 second interval test, now imagine how often they would happen if we ran a test on a 16.6ms interval to replicate Rocket league server rate. 

Actually as I started typing, I went and ran a test with Wireshark, which inspects the actual real packets being used. 

I'm attaching a graph hoping it gets approved, but the is a graph showing packet delta time (The latency between each packet) using Rocket League inbound UDP packets only, the time is only over 150 seconds to fit on the screen, but my logs show the same patterns over multiple hours and multiple servers.

It clearly shows a baseline of about 16ms with an absurd amount of spikes to 30ms and even more. The dips are mostly just Rocket League sending an immediate second packet if the first one size is maxed out, but now I'm wondering if Bell aggregates packets and processes them in batch, which would explain how we see a spike followed by a dip. This also tracks with Rocket League in game graph showing a inbound packets per second fluctuating between 64 and 55, unfortunately I don't have a screenshot of that at the moment.

Anyways, this data combined with the pingplotter spikes at the various Bell hops makes it pretty crystal clear imo. I'm not saying the game server itself aren't part of the issue, but Bell hops are definitely part of it, and this is what I want to illustrate.

At this point I've accepted Bell won't really fix this, or maybe I'm delusional in my expectations, but I'm just hoping this thread can help other people in diagnosing why they are lagging, because the in game lag is very real.

I appreacite your help through all of this. 

[Vanadiel · Accepted solution]

Try a buffer bloat test.

If you are experiencing issues with the test results, you will have to sacrifice network speed to remove the effects of buffer bloat.

Ideally it should look like this: https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat?test-id=b7eafe53-f3d9-4cdc-b515-d0a6353b2c32