Broadband Issues (SSE/Vodafone)

Hi all,

Hoping someone has some insight to the issues I'm facing. It's a very peculiar one which no-one on the technical support team can really help with.

-I'm with SSE who use Vodafone
-My internet's extremely sporadic
-Open Reach engineer came yesterday and tested socket which showed 68 dl and 20 ul speeds. The box also showed there were no issues
-The engineer (who was fantastic and very informative) even did a "swap and shift" to see if that could potentially resolve the issue as his tests had come back fine
-I play First Person Shooter games and always check my connection when joining a game. When my internet's working I'll usually have between 30-40 ping (if EU server) and 0% packet loss, but when my internet isn't working properly, I'll have between 70-90 ping (if EU server) and 8-28% packet loss
-The engineer mentioned REIN to me and told me I could tune my car radio to 620 and listen for (as he described) a low, wet gravel tone. I did this and nothing
-When I perform simple packet loss tests through packetlosstest.com I average between 4-6% packet loss out of 150 packets
-Even though my d/l speed sometimes shows 30-40Mbps, the packet loss still persists

Here are some pictures.
Imgur Pictures

Does anyone have any idea what the issue could be as I just don't have the knowledge of internet protocols! I've Googled as much as I could, and a few things I've seen are:
-Throttling (I asked SSE and they said they don't do this)
-DLM (the technician I spoke to didn't know what this was)

It's also worth mentioning the engineer told me I my interleave was fast upstream (0 ms) and slow downstream (8ms). Not sure if that's relevant.

Anyway, hope someone can help!

Thanks,
Lyam

In reply to a post by Lyam:

-The engineer mentioned REIN to me and told me I could tune my car radio to 620 and listen for (as he described) a low, wet gravel tone. I did this and nothing

Apologies for a rather obvious question but did you try the car radio test while your internet was acting up? You will only hear the interference on your car radio at the same time as your internet is dodgy.

In reply to a post by GonePostal:

In reply to a post by Lyam:

-The engineer mentioned REIN to me and told me I could tune my car radio to 620 and listen for (as he described) a low, wet gravel tone. I did this and nothing

Apologies for a rather obvious question but did you try the car radio test while your internet was acting up? You will only hear the interference on your car radio at the same time as your internet is dodgy.

Yep, I made sure I checked when it was playing up. The engineer told me it could be interference from neighbours. I even recorded the audio from my radio and sent him a message and he told me it wasn't the sound of interference.

I've provided more speed tests and a new ping test to SSE who've escalated this and forwarded it to Vodafone. I don't really understand the ping trace, more specifically - I don't understand all the different IP addresses but when looking at the data, it passes certain points with no problem then all of a sudden packets are lost at almost every other point thereafter.

Not all locations on a trace route may respond to the requests, so if no response from an IP that is usually why.

It is perfectly possible that the VDSL2 is perfectly fine, and also SSE are not throttling but simply the service is busy

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Not all locations on a trace route may respond to the requests, so if no response from an IP that is usually why.

It is perfectly possible that the VDSL2 is perfectly fine, and also SSE are not throttling but simply the service is busy

Thanks for the reply!

Ultimately, something's happened for my internet to go from reliable and fast to unreliable and slow. For months, my internet was fine and then all of a sudden it's not. Over 10 days of slow speeds which won't even load streams at 480p. I don't know exactly what constitutes a busy server but I'd assume there would be a gradual decline in performance as the server was more overloaded, not a one-off massive decline (unless it's become so congested the server just tilted like a see-saw). It's also worth mentioning I've asked on the local Facebook group (I live in a flat) if anyone's experienced any issues and no one has, and 2 of the people who replied were with Vodafone.

SSE is not a large provider so overloading of a service which is likely to be specific to them is going to be rare

If your router/modem is reporting the usual connection speeds and error counters are running at the usual rates, then suggests connection to the local street cabinet hardware is good.

If this is ISP congestion generally between 1am and 8am things will perform better.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

SSE is not a large provider so overloading of a service which is likely to be specific to them is going to be rare

If your router/modem is reporting the usual connection speeds and error counters are running at the usual rates, then suggests connection to the local street cabinet hardware is good.

If this is ISP congestion generally between 1am and 8am things will perform better.

Thanks again for the reply! When I was with the engineer, he did 3 tests (1 at my socket, 1 in the basement of flat, and 1 at cabinet) and they all showed everything was fine, but the error counter was exactly the same on all 3 tests which he referred to as a "red herring".

If it is congestion, is there anything I can do as a customer? Or is it pretty much something I'll need to deal with or go to a new provider?

I don't think you have linked where you intended in you OP. I see animal heads.

If you use the thinkbroadband speedtester that can should up likely congestion as it runs a single thread then a multiple thread test. Then picking up the shared link and posting it here will help us. Particularly MrSaffron.

If you are not registered on the Main Site where the tester is located, (it's a separate login from this one), it would be best to do so first, as it then saves your history and you can access that. You can use the same username and password as on these forums if you wish, just register it there as well.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

I don't think you have linked where you intended in you OP. I see animal heads.

If you use the thinkbroadband speedtester that can should up likely congestion as it runs a single thread then a multiple thread test. Then picking up the shared link and posting it here will help us. Particularly MrSaffron.

If you are not registered on the Main Site where the tester is located, (it's a separate login from this one), it would be best to do so first, as it then saves your history and you can access that. You can use the same username and password as on these forums if you wish, just register it there as well.

Thanks for the reply. I've just ran two three tests and are linked here:

Extreme congestion or throttling, or some setting has been set wrong somewhere.

If the same at an obviously quite time e.g. 1am to 7am then a fault looks likely