It is a modem issue, but your Draytek also isn't doing anything to help.

Because the modems aren't likely to be fixed anytime soon (well maybe the Virgin one when they move to DOCSIS 3.1) you need to move the bottleneck into your router and solve the problem there. You do this by limiting the speed of your router's WAN connections to below their actual speed.

Unfortunately i don't know what facilities the Draytek 2920 has to help with this (after the trauma of running a 2820vn for a couple of years i've tried to forget the existence of Draytek all together).

Thanks - achievable I reckon. Will take a look later as I can put bandwidth restrictions in place.

Nice to hear

Its a bit of a complex one, but yes is largely down to the router people are using, hence why even fast providers can suffer it, while delivering otherwise good speeds.

With the Bring Your Own Router providers it is more complex but plan to try and show some profile charts for those providers in the blog where I have more space.

Grade A people should basically find that they can game while doing a lot with their connection, and there is a growing movement to get different algorithms embedded in CPE to help, though in the short term people can effectively do their own QoS on some devices.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Its a bit of a complex one, but yes is largely down to the router people are using ...

Hmm, interesting... pity you can't identify the router from your end

Here's mine http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest/401304 do we live next door perchance ?

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

With the Bring Your Own Router providers it is more complex but plan to try and show some profile charts for those providers in the blog where I have more space.

Showing buffer bloat vs ISP is perhaps clouding the issue, when it's a CPE issue and not an ISP network issue. Some ISPs are going to have a much higher percentage of non-ISP supplied routers than others.

Short of creating a test page with a huge list of user-selectable routers in a menu though, it's going to be very difficult to graph buffer bloat vs router model. Perhaps a router brand drop-down is workable?

Edited by Oliver341 (Fri 01-May-15 12:50:00)

Maybe a drop down, but given when we've tried asking similar questions in the past the error rate is pretty high e.g. ask people if on 3G and you still get loads picking that when clearly on a fixed line provider.

All this extra need to explain is why it will be a blog item, so can include the profiles for each ISP, and then see patterns emerge and can then investigate further.

Did some bandwidth restrictions and here are results (don't know what a - means better than an A or worse than an F?)

BT 40/10
100% C
75% B
50% B
25% B

VM 100/6
100% F
75% F
50% F
25% -

The VM is awful. So that either means it's modem or VM side.

Slight improvement on BT when reducing bandwidth useage.

On an FTTP connection from that well known commercial altnet I can report an 'A' both ways.
Typical ping times from the windows command prompt to google.com are 5ms.