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

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.

Mine from 3/12 looks more like Candlerb's - 3 December

Pretty much every day looks the same as this one.

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

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.

In reply to a post by AGinWorcs:

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.

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

You have done a virus/malware scan I take it? Not got a torrent client running in the background?

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.

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.