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Hi all,
I've got an Aquiss 330 Mbps connection via Openreach, but I'm not at all happy with the latency:
My Broadband Ping
As somebody who was with VM for 25 years I've experienced a lot worse, but the BQM you see here is (to me) pretty disappointing for an FTTP connection. Any observations, or tests I can make? Is this likely to be the upstream network Aquiss use, the local OR circuit, or something else?
I've got the option of Lit Fibre, but my first preference would be to stay with Aquiss, and my second preference would be to use another Openreach based provider.
Thanks for any thoughts on the matter
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Would depend on how far you are from London, the BQM Ping Box is located in London a few miles from me, so the further you are from it will cause higher latency.
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Paul
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If the concern is the latency spikes rather than the base latency, then I would suggest applying QoS on the upstream.
That sorted out the latency spikes on my 145 Mbps FTTP.
I did not need to apply QoS on the downstream.
I applied the QoS using my own router running OpenWrt.
My old router did not have the processor "horse power" to support speeds above 80/20 with QoS.
So became my excuse to buy router with a better processor.
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Good Morning,
Firstly, I don't recall if you have brought this to our attention, but if you have, can you advise what your support ticket reference is, so I can see what have been discussed so far?
The link provided appears to be a sample graph from December 3rd, nearly a week ago. Can you provide your live link as old data is not really that useful. The sample at that time, would highlight a connection being used, but the baseline latency looks fine.
What MTU are you running across your network kit? We advise 1500 end to end.
Martin Pitt
Managing Director
Aquiss Limited
https://www.aquiss.net
SoGEA, FTTP, FTTH, Leased Lines, Telecoms and Hosting |
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The above post has been made by an ISP REPRESENTATIVE (although not necessarily the ISP being discussed in the post).
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Intrigued as to why Lit would be your third choice, if you have questions about the service then I can answer them. I have had the 500Mbps package with a static IP since April and cannot rate them highly enough.
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Latency can be down to lots of factors, mostly distance. Amount of hops/route too. All of which you have no control over unless you move home.
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Thanks all for your attention and thoughts. Covering off a range of your ideas:
1) It's the peak latency spikes that are the concern as spiking like that illustrates an iffy connection that's poor for gaming and work video calls. On a bad day my BQM looks like a very poor Virgin Media connection where they've got an over-utilisation fault. I spent a few years as a super user in the VM's forums, I'm pretty comfortable with reading a BQM - and in their case latency faults are invariably on the local coax circuit of HFC (which shouldn't apply with OR FTTP).
2) Minimum latency is fine, my concerns have nothing to do with distance from the TBB BQM servers.
3) I suppose the router might be a problem, it's a TP-Link Deco M4, and was fine when I first connected to FTTP, and has been faultless on Virgin Media 250 Mbps connection for a couple of years before (their hub in modem mode). I ran a permanent BQM when with VM, so I'm very confident what I'm seeing at the moment is not reflecting any router limitations.
4) I believe the Deco M4 defaults to 1500 MTU
5) For reasons above, I don't think it's my router or configuration - the problem is only apparent during normal internet traffic hours, and disappears overnight. The spiking is still visible on the BQM when there's no activity on my connection.
6) I originally selected a BQM snapshot from a few days back as being representative and neither best or worst - I'm aware there's been some big games releases and sporting events this week that have created large internet traffic volumes.
7) Live BQM:
My Broadband Ping
8) For Martin, I haven't raised a service request yet because whilst I don't think it's my setup, I wanted to make sure that I wasn't missing anything, and get the wisdom of the forum.
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Whats the bufferbloat of your router like? try this online tool at waveform.com
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1) It's the peak latency spikes that are the concern as spiking like that illustrates an iffy connection that's poor for gaming and work video calls.
You can only conclude that with certainty if the line is unused while the tests are taking place.
If you're stuffing the pipe full of traffic (esp uploads), and have no bufferbloat protection on the outgoing side, then pings are bound to get queued up behind other packets, and that's normal.
As it happens, I have exactly the same service as you: Aquiss FTTP 300/50. I have a Mikrotik RB4011 as my router, which has a minimal amount of outbound QoS configured:
| Text | 1
23
4 | /queue type
add kind=sfq name=sfq-default sfq-perturb=10/queue simple
add dst=pppoe-out2 max-limit=50M/330M name=nuc1 queue=sfq-default/default target=10.0.0.0/8,2001:4d48:XXXX:XX00::/56 |
Here's my BQM: IPv4 | IPv6
Of course, these aren't directly comparable to yours, because our utilization patterns could be very different. I do occasional big downloads but most of the time there's nothing other than the odd video stream (<10Mbps)
But if it turns out that the increased BQM latency you see coincides with periods of a lot of activity on your network, then it would suggest that the issue you see simply reflects queuing on your side. To see the activity on your network, of course, you'll need to get WAN interface throughput graphs from your router, for example using SNMP.
Remember the yellow line is 99th percentile, i.e. only 1 in 100 packets sees this latency. The blue line is average. And packet loss, as far as I can see, is zero. This seems pretty good to me.
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"But if it turns out that the increased BQM latency you see coincides with periods of a lot of activity on your network, "
But that's the point - it doesn't. Here's a plot of a day when nobody was at home:
My Broadband Ping
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"But if it turns out that the increased BQM latency you see coincides with periods of a lot of activity on your network, " Not being at home is very different than the link not being used. In your situation I would disconnect all devices connected via ethernet and Wifi and then see what happens on the BQM. If its still bad I would then suggest you reach out to Aquiss.
Edited by PCJM40 (Sun 10-Dec-23 10:24:39)
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I'd go further and directly connect a linux machine to the ont and then check bqm....
Also i'd do two or three checks over several days via different peering routes.
Edited by Taras (Sun 10-Dec-23 10:12:46)
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Are you actually having issues with your gaming and video calls or just looking at the possible issues?
Was Eclipse Home Option 1, VM 2Mb & O2 Standard
Utility Warehouse (up to 16mbps) via Talk Talk, upgraded to fibre 40/10
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I’m on Aquiss, and my BQM looks similar to yours during business hours when the connection is idle. Here are the BQM graphs for Monday and Tuesday last week:
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...
I spoke to Aquiss, but we didn’t reach a conclusion mainly due to me not responding to the last email. I suspect that the latency spikes are not directly related to my connection, but rather a hop somewhere close to the BQM server. I’ve concluded this because I have my router pinging Google, the BBC, and the BQM server outbound, and the spikes are not reflected in my own router’s graphs.
Previously, I was with IDNet on the same router and same connection speed, and the graph was always completely flat green every day. The spikes started on the day of my migration. My connection performs fine though.
Edited by MrClump (Sun 10-Dec-23 11:49:18)
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I suspect that the latency spikes are not directly related to my connection, but rather a hop somewhere close to the BQM server.
You could always try comparing with f8lure an independent third party, if you use it long term do the right thing and send some money to help with the costs.
https://f8lure.mouselike.org/auth.asp
23 years of broadband connectivity since 1999 trial - Live BQM
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I left Aquiss because of these sort of issues and terrible slow downs and the moment I entered new credentials for a new ISP (all my kit was exactly the same, not even power cycled) all the issues went away.
Aquiss resell Entanet, so as soon as possible the connection is handed off to an Entanet POP, and Entanet just don't seem able to monitor these, or they just let them run hot and overloaded, and due to their spread out estate not everyone will see the same problem.
Good luck to the OP getting it fixed, I never got a fix so left my contract early. Martin will help as much as he can but at the end of the day they are at the mercy of Entanet, who from my experience either were completely clueless to the problems or knew exactly what the issues were and it was by design, i.e. they are maximizing their capacity and accept the risk of congestion at peak times.
Edited by E300 (Sun 10-Dec-23 12:20:42)
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That's exactly how I understand they run their network, they run it hot and rely on QOS to smooth things out. ISP's can also pick the priority level, however it gets expensive quickly.
Also business and personal switch priorities through the day, off-peak consumers get priority and peak business get priority.
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....business and personal switch priorities through the day, off-peak consumers get priority and peak business get priority.
This has not been in the case since 2013. Please don't post FUD.
Martin Pitt
Managing Director
Aquiss Limited
https://www.aquiss.net
SoGEA, FTTP, FTTH, Leased Lines, Telecoms and Hosting Edited by aquiss (Sun 10-Dec-23 13:24:15)
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The above post has been made by an ISP REPRESENTATIVE (although not necessarily the ISP being discussed in the post).
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To be fair to that poster, this was the exact issue I was seeing if you recall, my service degraded from 9am every morning Monday-Friday and then got better after 5pm. Not a single issue on bank holidays or weekends, it was obvious I was being affected by business traffic. I understand all Aquiss customers have the same priority, but does Entanets Wholesale traffic have the same priority as their more profitable business traffic? If I had the same priority across Entanets network as the business traffic that came online from 9am so we all slowed down to the same speed, then those businesses were getting a shockingly poor service from Entanet.
Edited by E300 (Sun 10-Dec-23 14:09:19)
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I understand all Aquiss customers have the same priority, but does Entanets Wholesale traffic have the same priority as their more profitable business traffic?
CityFibre Wholesale (nee Entanet) only sell one priority level (on offnet..ie: Openreach) regardless if it's home or business, so they have no any package markers to highlight one over the other, to manage them any differently or control in any time periods. As I say, those days went roughly when they dropped usage capped products in circa 2013.
The difference with Home v Business contractual SLAs, which firmly sits on our side and the care levels we take off Openreach/BTW.
Personally speaking, I'm disappointed we didn't get to the bottom of your personal issue E300, especially as you worked really close with us (mainly myself) and to that I can't thank you enough as open engagement sits well with me. I'm just glad to read you are sorted, which at the end of the day, is the main thing for me.
Martin Pitt
Managing Director
Aquiss Limited
https://www.aquiss.net
SoGEA, FTTP, FTTH, Leased Lines, Telecoms and Hosting
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The above post has been made by an ISP REPRESENTATIVE (although not necessarily the ISP being discussed in the post).
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Again thanks to all who have contributed. Looking at BQM's other have posted, and the comments this is the conclusion I come to:
1) My own and the other Entanet-carried BQMs posted here show a spiking latency profile that's consistent with business traffic, with a 9am start and winding down in late afternoon, although individual days vary, some are very good days, others are not very good at all. Sometimes the issue persists into the evening, that seem to be when there's multiple streamed sports matches or big game releases.
2) Comparing MrClump's BQM with my own for the same date, the latency spiking is different and worse for me on those days - suggesting something to do with Entanet traffic that is consistent in principle, but varies by region. This supports the "running hot" opinion, and would explain why it looks like VM's network when they run out of local capacity - in principle the same thing that data is being queued at some point, although in VM's case it's usually very localised at the CMTS.
3) Do I notice any effect? Well yes, that's why I set up the BQM. Logically the up to 120ms spikes are not perceivable, but experience with VM and on this connection means I see the effects of them - game glitches, teleporting, being shot by players I can't see or missing my own shots. The experience at the moment, both in use and on BQM is quite like using VM before they patched the Puma chipset fault. With work video calls, again it's the effect of out of sequence packets that create glitches that the software struggles with. In neither case is it disastrously bad, but it's below my expectations for a new FTTP connection.
4) So I think it seems this is outside of Aquiss control, it's almost certainly attributable to Entanet. I'd guess that the problem arose when Entanet had an MBO in 2014, at which point caning the assets was necessary to cover the financing and get the business into shape for a subsequent trade sale. And whilst CityFibre (who bought Entanet in 2017) might have higher aspirations, they're subject to the wider pressures on the altnet sector so perhaps aren't motivated to fix this minor issue - if a minor degradation is not causing problems for most users, but gets you 3% more sales, what would any of us do?
5) So, what next for me? I don't know. One thing that's certain, and that is that if I do conclude that I want to change ISP it won't be back to any large ISP. The latency issue is not a huge thing and I'm pretty sure the overwhelming majority of customers do not notice any problem. I'd happily recommend Aquiss to others, unless I thought those others were as pernickety as I am.
Andrew
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1) My own and the other Entanet-carried BQMs posted here show a spiking latency profile that's consistent with business traffic, with a 9am start and winding down in late afternoon,
You drawn that conclusion how, from 2 replies? Did you ignore the comments from candlerb? https://forums.thinkbroadband.com/general/t/4748629-...
...... snip ......
5) So, what next for me? I don't know.
Maybe opening a ticket with our support desk? Just a thought.
Martin Pitt
Managing Director
Aquiss Limited
https://www.aquiss.net
SoGEA, FTTP, FTTH, Leased Lines, Telecoms and Hosting
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The above post has been made by an ISP REPRESENTATIVE (although not necessarily the ISP being discussed in the post).
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Mine from 3/12 looks more like Candlerb's - 3 December
Pretty much every day looks the same as this one.
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I don't understand your continued reluctance to reach out to Aquiss, you wanted to scope the issue yourself first and now you have it really is time to give them a call, they don't bite 
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Well, I also draw on several years observing my own and other people's BQMs for VM customers. Traffic patterns for business and domestic users are distinct. I've seen many "clean" BQM for other FTTP providers, there's SOMETHING happens on my Aquiss Entanet largely during daylight hours. If that isn't down to daytime business traffic causing contention somewhere upstream then what else could it be? And why is my BQM pretty faultless between 00:00 and 08:00?
There will only be a latency spike if a packet gets queued somewhere, if it's down to my connection then that implies my 300/45 Mbps connection is being saturated - and that won't be the case when the house is empty as there's no smart home equipment, no digital TV box doing its own thing, no remotely monitored systems, nothing downloading updates as the only "live" devices would be the mobiles and they're out the house on the day in question or other similar examples. I should also point out that when I was with VM (same location, same router) I didn't see this sort of daytime degradation unless the DOCSIS power levels or SNR went out of range.
More than happy to raise a support ticket, but is this really resolvable? I'd anticipate Aquiss will refer to Entanet, who will come back with what VM used to say in similar situations "all looks good from our side", and if the majority of customers are happy, then that's their call on asset utilisation.
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More than happy to raise a support ticket, but is this really resolvable? I'd anticipate Aquiss will refer to Entanet, who will come back with what VM used to say in similar situations "all looks good from our side", and if the majority of customers are happy, then that's their call on asset utilisation.
I think it is only fair to raise the ticket and allow Martin to investigate and respond back on the situation as he sees it.
Ultimately, he wants happy customers and can be very reasonable from a contractual perspective when he feels it appropriate.
I'm with AAISP now, but so nearly rejoined Aquiss earlier this year and certainly haven't ruled out using them in the future.
Interested to see how this plays out.
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I've now raised a ticket. Whilst completing the ticket with suitable examples, I went back to see what the history was, and (with the same equipment and use patterns) here's a day from about three months back:
My Broadband Ping
No complaints about that!
The issue is something that's developed over the past two months or so, we'll see what the investigations can show.
A
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You have done a virus/malware scan I take it? Not got a torrent client running in the background?
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So first of all sorry that this is a little delayed in posting but given the nature of what I needed to do to make this post it took awhile to not only simply get around to doing it but to also have the time to change connections to do it as well, plus Christmas also happened.
Anyways, I saw this thread a while ago and realised I might be able to add something of value to it.
You see I have both a Plusnet and Aquiss FTTP 1000mbps connection coming into the house. This has allowed me to compare them using the same equipment and settings other than changing of user name and password to get the connection working.
Because of the nature of internet use I made sure to give Aquiss the best possible outcome by changing over everything on my network so it only used the PN connection. It’s been like this for coming up to a week now.
At the same time I also disconnected the Aquiss router from the network completely. It only has two ports. One goes to the ONT and one goes to my network switch. I physically unplugged it from the network switch.
Both routers are the same and run OpenWRT with the same configuration besides the small changes needed to get each connection to work like user name and password. Neither have extra services running that would generate traffic.
With all that said here are today’s BQM’s from both lines:
Plusnet
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...
Aquiss
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...
As you can see even with everything getting sent to the Plusnet connection it has one small spike and no drops.
Whereas the Aquiss connection has plenty of spikes and tiny little bits of red drops here and there.
Just to make it clear. There is no traffic coming from me, IoT, other people in the house or devices I’ve forgotten about on the Aquiss line. It is not connected to the network, nor does it have wireless. The spikes are occurring either at the ONT or beyond.
I offer this comparison not so much as a complaint merely as what I hope is helpful and informative information relatable to this thread.
Despite the above BQM results I have experienced no problems while using the Aquiss connection. It’s fast and stable. So for me I don’t see it as a problem. Just thought this thread might find it interesting is all.
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I am with Aquiss and have a similar BQM between 8am and 6pm-ish. I read somewhere yesterday about enabling QOS on the upload, so I have done that and set to 95% of the upload limit. My graph today has improved quite significantly. It doesn't affect me, have multiple Teams calls a day and haven't had an issue. I work from Dropbox so regularly uploading/downloading so just assumed it was that. Haven't seen it as being an issue so haven't raised it with Aquiss.
Here's my typical workday BQM from 8 Jan 2024.
https://i.ibb.co/fMQWwzz/Screenshot-2024-01-17-at-09...
Here is today's so far. I did get big packet loss around 10pm last night that affected me watching ITVX. I switched on QOS around 2pm yesterday.
https://i.ibb.co/bX79dYm/Screenshot-2024-01-17-at-09...
My current live graph in my signature.
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OK, some months further on. The good news is that the problem is both less marked in day to day experience and the BQM confirms that - some days have been really excellent in the past few weeks there's been only a few days that were iffy, although sometimes they were very iffy. But the underlying problem hasn't gone away - I've engaged with Aquiss, raised a ticket, tried the things suggested but none of these has made a difference. Martin has looked at things, but his view is that this isn't down to either Entanet (my original suspicion, now disproven), nor to Aquiss. Without any indications of the cause I tried running Pingplotter to both TBB, and to Google when the problem was evident, and what that shows is that one particular server is seeing occasional spikes. As I can't post a screenshot, I'll type below an example of the key data, apologies for the formatting, best I can do without a fixed width font.
Server/hop Avg ms Max
My router 1.0 1.8
78.33.253.10 7.6 17.4
78.33.253.1 8.0 13.1
188.39.127.242 8.1 15.2
172.30.2.53 9.6 71.1
172.30.1.148 7.7 10.6
195.66.236.240 8.6 28.3
80.249.97.84 9.3 41.2
80.249.106.141 8.3 16.3
Now, I know that there's always a bit of leeway on hops and traffic routing is subject to variability, but the persistent thing is that when I observe problems, Pingplotter always picks out 172.30.2.53 as having much higher maximum value, as in this case where in a few minutes of monitoring that hop was up to 71.1 ms.
Thoughts, opinions?
Thanks, Andrew
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what that shows is that one particular server is seeing occasional spikes.
That doesn't tell you anything useful. It's not a server, it's a router; and whilst routers forward packets in hardware, but they send response packets from the CPU (and at low priority).
In this case, it's sending an ICMP error "time to live exceeded" in response to a traceroute probe. It means that the CPU on that router is busy from time to time, nothing more. It's definitely not a problem. The fact that packets reach the subsequent hops without any additional delay proves that.
best I can do without a fixed width font.
To get a fixed width font, surround your text with "code" and "/code" in square brackets.
For posting images, use an image hosting service like imgur and post the URL.
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OK, some months further on. The good news is that the problem is both less marked in day to day experience and the BQM confirms that - some days have been really excellent in the past few weeks there's been only a few days that were iffy, although sometimes they were very iffy. But the underlying problem hasn't gone away - I've engaged with Aquiss, raised a ticket, tried the things suggested but none of these has made a difference. Martin has looked at things, but his view is that this isn't down to either Entanet (my original suspicion, now disproven), nor to Aquiss. Without any indications of the cause I tried running Pingplotter to both TBB, and to Google when the problem was evident, and what that shows is that one particular server is seeing occasional spikes. As I can't post a screenshot, I'll type below an example of the key data, apologies for the formatting, best I can do without a fixed width font.
Server/hop Avg ms Max
My router 1.0 1.8
78.33.253.10 7.6 17.4
78.33.253.1 8.0 13.1
188.39.127.242 8.1 15.2
172.30.2.53 9.6 71.1
172.30.1.148 7.7 10.6
195.66.236.240 8.6 28.3
80.249.97.84 9.3 41.2
80.249.106.141 8.3 16.3
Now, I know that there's always a bit of leeway on hops and traffic routing is subject to variability, but the persistent thing is that when I observe problems, Pingplotter always picks out 172.30.2.53 as having much higher maximum value, as in this case where in a few minutes of monitoring that hop was up to 71.1 ms.
Thoughts, opinions?
Firstly - one stray packet in middle of a traceroute isn't much to worry about. The average latency isn't too far out. Routers aren't designed to respond TO that traffic to the router - they focus on delivering packets THROUGH the router.. You'd have to look for an increase consistently from a point to draw conclusions. It doesn't rule an issue out but neither does it rule it in.
172.30.2.53 is an internal IP probably on Entanet's network
195.66.236.240 is our LINX LON2 router (route back appears to be via LINX LON1)
188.39.127.242 is Entanet
Looking at your latt 24 hours I don't think there's anything wrong with your BQM.. you have a few spikes in max latency but nothing of major concern. A couple of dropped packets maybe in 24 hours..
seb
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The author of the above post is a thinkbroadband staff member. It may not constitute an official statement on behalf of thinkbroadband.
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Thanks for that, Seb. I'd agree there's no current problem, indeed the last 24 hours have been very consistent and no cause for complaint, it's just that there's odd days when things aren't so rosy. Although the figures I quoted show the maximum, it's not about that single highest packet, but that particular IP.
So when I am noticing problems I might run a Pingplotter session, and that will show multiple packets with higher latency spikes at that IP, usually not enough to lift the average, but certainly enough to cause break up or inconsistencies in Teams, and inevitably an impact on gaming. So eg 6th or 13 March were disappointing in my view for a new-ish FTTP connection, and the figures quoted were from a short run on the 13th (incidentally, contrast 1 March with 8 March). I can't see anything obvious in terms of time-of-month, but it seems when problems do occur they're weekdays and mostly working hours.
Andrew
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