Thanks, I�m with you now.

In reply to a post by mrnelster:

So what you are trying to say, is that the monitor pings every second, and the yellow spike will be the highest of those hundred responses?

And the blue is the average for that second, so also important if it gets very high.

Some minor packet loss at times last night.

Live graph.

So what am I meant to be learning from all of this; maybe I am not understanding the basics clearly?

Your monitor is poking my router and waiting for a response. If my router is set up correctly, and QOS is doing it�s job, why would loading a web page create such a spike? I always reasoned that unless my connection was being saturated (or my router overwhelmed) that the latency would remain relatively constant. Even with a couple of people streaming, YouTube/Netflix etc, in principle I didn�t envisage such increases in latency.

That�s why I bought a higher end [domestic] router. So if it isn�t queuing at the router, why such high latency unless I am saturating my bandwidth? If I�m consuming 15Mbps solidly, on a 50Mbps/10ms connection, theoretically other than traffic/contention issues, should I expect the monitor to report such elevated responses?

Am I missing something fundamental in my reasoning, or is this exactly what the erratic buffer bloat tesults are trying to tell me? In real world terms (for gaming) I would be better served by a constant 50ms ping, than being recognised as a 10 whilst regularly bouncing up to 140, if you get my drift. Prediction must be terrible.

So I think what I need to do next, is to turn everything in the house off and record a gaming session on the BQM.

Do you have QoS set up?

YouTube/Netlix may say a 4 Mbps rate but if you watch the traffic flow it is often spikey and its those spikes

Any use of the connection can impact things, unless your router has a processor dedicated to responding to ping requests

6 random pixels of packet loss - not enough to lose sleep over

Yes QoS is on and prioritising gaming. I read somewhere that latency beyond 100ms causes VoIP users to talk over one another. I often get that during in-game chat.

Next step will be everything off for a few hours. Then a gaming session with everything else off.

But does the QoS prioritise your voice chat? Gaming QoS settings probably just deal with gameplay rather than the voice comms

Or worse the QoS is not doing what you expect at all, i.e. different games will behave differently

If nothing else using the connection you can test if QoS is helping or not, by playing with it off and with it on. Also make sure you are using a nearby server when evaluating gaming since there may be lots network between you and server and may be that rather your broadband that is the issue

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

But does the QoS prioritise your voice chat? Gaming QoS settings probably just deal with gameplay rather than the voice comms

Don't know. Will look into that, but that issue pre dates this router I think.

Or worse the QoS is not doing what you expect at all, i.e. different games will behave differently

If nothing else using the connection you can test if QoS is helping or not, by playing with it off and with it on. Also make sure you are using a nearby server when evaluating gaming since there may be lots network between you and server and may be that rather your broadband that is the issue

That is essentially what I am trying to establish. What effect the buffer bloat may be having on my connection. If because of it the matchmaking servers are lumping my connection in with consistently poorer quality ones, that matters.

Out of interest, while reading up on buffer bloat I found fast.com recommended as now measuring the effect of load on latency. The test shows my exhange as different to the one I have been connected to historically; the same one TBB and SamKnows has always agreed with.

Does anybody know if the FTTC can be run in from a different exchange, or could the original exchange be linked to the more central one that fast.com is stating?

My exchange has always been Stny Stratford - fast.com shows it as Fishermead.

How does fast.com show your exchange?

It reports a GeoLocation based on your IP address which is NOTHING to do with the exchange and can be hundreds of miles out from your real location.

Not at all sure on its latency measurements during upload phase, as it reports 400ms whereas I see around 100ms from our tester. Looking at network traffic I think it is actually reporting the latency for the upload packets rather than attempting to download a small packet in the middle of the upload stream.

Dunno. Just says Fishermead, which is actually the Bradwell Abbey exchange and the main one in Milton Keynes. We are closer to it than the Stony Stratford exchange we have historically been connected to. It says �Client: Fishermead� so wondered if that meant we were passing through it in some way.

I know geo location can be anywhere, but interestingly mine is at the opposite end of the city. So connected at one end of the city, geo location at the other end, and the �Client� smack bang in the middle. Seems a pretty daft way of going about things to me. Misleading, pointless information.

I�ve never been to fast.com before. I clicked it after visiting bufferbloat.net

Haven�t read it properly yet or tried their quick test, as I haven�t been near my PC, but it looks interesting.