WiFi Bandwidth maximizing when barely using anything

Hi everyone. I hope I'm posting in the right area but I could use some technical expertise on this one!

Firstly, I'm so glad I signed up to thinkbroadbands internet monitoring chart!

Let me explain my situation;

I have 70mb DL 20mb UL fibre from talk talk and I'm currently using wireless on my PC. I have 0 problems with my service normally... but every now and then (we're talking every couple of months), the wifi almost acts as if I'm being DDOS'd in some form. I play a lot of online games and I use VoIP software such as teamspeak. When I'm having these issues, the connection jitters every few seconds. For example, when talking to someone online, i'll hear their sentence, they'll be a brief pause and then i'll hear the rest of what they said, like it keeps cutting out which can generally be attributed to packet loss.

Even when I'm not downloading anything or know they nobody else in the house is using the wifi, it is acting like the bandwidth is being completely squeezed by something and I just cannot figure out what it is.

Thankfully, thinkbroadbands chart has been monitoring my connection for months now and it provides a perfect example of what my internet is like normally.. and what its like when its going pear shaped. Unfortunately its been going pear shaped for the last few days so it has made me jump on here to find out what it could possibly be. (And yes, i've tried the usual diagnostics of resetting my router etc. Changing wireless channels only sometimes alleviates the problem before it starts getting intermittent issues again.) I'm quite savvy when it comes to basic problems with the internet but this issue has me baffled.

The monitor i'm using is located here, just in case anyone hasn't seen it;
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/monitors.html

Now, let me show you how the internet looks when its working absolutely flawlessly, no wifi issues at all. These charts are from the 1st, 2nd and 3rd of June;
(records go back to march 2015)
1st June 2015;
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/28ad4bbbd6d...

2nd June 2015;
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/f7a3c0207f9...

3rd June 2015;
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/556b639a338...

Now with 4th of June.. is where the wifi is having problems. Whilst generally surfing the web isn't very laggy or anything, its mostly has nasty effects with online gaming and VoIP because of how constantly demanding it can be. Now, just look at the difference now;

4th June 2015;
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/5c3c48daeab...

5th June 2015;
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/cae885998d3...

6th June 2015 is the same, and 7th June 2015;
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/4278d892fd3...

The funny thing with 7th is you can see the internet suddenly go back to normal at 2pm. That was because I tried changing the wireless channel again and it temporarily fixed it before it went straight back being rubbish again a few hours later. As a side note, changing the wireless channel on the previous days literally did nothing.

From looking at the charts, it just gives me the impression something is hogging all of the bandwidth, as if I'm downloading/uploading all at the same time and thus gives these strange wifi intermittent problems.

I'm running out of ideas and I'd love to know what on earth could be interfering that much. These charts show this even when nobody is using the internet for anything at all. I just don't get it unfortunately.

These are my current router stats if it helps. I'm using Talk Talk's Super Router. I believe I got similar issues with the router before it. It could be the weather, it could be the neighbour.. but I just can't pinpoint what exactly could be causing the charts to skyrocket.

Internet Connection

DSL synchronization status:
Up
Connection status:
Showtime

Line Quality

Upstream line rate (kbit/s):
19999
Downstream line rate (kbit/s):
69594
Upstream noise safety coefficient (dB):
7
Downstream noise safety coefficient (dB):
6.4
Upstream interleave depth:
0
Downstream interleave depth:
0
Line standard:
VDSL
Upstream line attenuation (dB):
12.5
Downstream line attenuation (dB):
6.3
Upstream output power (dBm):
-1.7
Downstream output power (dBm):
13.9
Downstream interleave depth:
None

Network card; Edimax ew-7612pin wireless pci with latest drivers from realtek.

Thank you very much for reading and I'm hoping someone could shine some light on this for me.

Regards

Edited by deleted (Sun 07-Jun-15 21:20:11)

The monitor is only testing up to the router so wireless should not influence it unless there is something making major use of the connection, or router is grunning out of memory and the setting changes help to release memory.

The solid red blocks are those when you have issues?

but that is almost suggesting that the connection beyond the router is getting absolutely hammered and is affecting the bandwidth in my entire house. I understand the monitor isn't related to wifi but thats just how i connect at the moment.

No, the solid red blocks is when my PC is turned off and isn't using the internet.

Urm red is odd then since routers usually stay connected if pc is off. Or do you switch that off too?

Check that error rate and noise margins are not bad next time it happens

Plus set a new wireless security key

I don't switch the router off so I'm not sure why it stops monitoring. There's mobile phones, ipads and such connecting to it even during the red zone but it only seems to monitor my PC. (wish to be honest I don't really mind)

Current stats

Upstream line rate (kbit/s):
19999
Downstream line rate (kbit/s):
69594
Upstream noise safety coefficient (dB):
7.1
Downstream noise safety coefficient (dB):
6.4
Upstream interleave depth:
0
Downstream interleave depth:
0
Line standard:
VDSL
Upstream line attenuation (dB):
12.5
Downstream line attenuation (dB):
6.3
Upstream output power (dBm):
-1.7
Downstream output power (dBm):
13.9

Here's a snapshot of my wifi card's wireless software;
http://i.imgur.com/J3KovgK.png

And to keep everyone up with progress, here's Monday;
mon - http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/683e4e8e1bd...

as you can see it has improved and yes, voip and online gaming has been good enough with spikes now and then. I'm more interested in the fact the peaks are somewhat returning to normal, give or take a few spikes.. and comparison to the absolutely wild results i was getting a few days ago. (the chart literally covered in max latency etc)

oh, and i've changed nothing recently. no wifi channel changes, no nothing. This problem usually fixes itself but i'd still love to know what on earth is going on when it goes crazy like it has been.

I did try changing the wifi password and it made no difference.

Edited by deleted (Tue 09-Jun-15 14:55:59)

could the PC be in a DMZ and the ICMP packets be forwarded to the PC?

DMZ is enabled for my pc right now yes.

Well.. it was recovering and now it has started going back to its usual max latency!

Here's a picture of my wireless statistics;
http://i.imgur.com/SZf6pja.png

And the current graph is;
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/f5185ba6dc4...

I'm considering posting this on TalkTalks support forums as well. It's getting pretty frustrating.

If my understanding of the DMZ is correct (that it causes packets such as ICMP pings to be forwarded to the PC), then your monitoring has a problem.

Essentially, the monitoring is unable to distinguish whether your problem lies on the internet side (your DSL link, the Openreach back haul, or the TT back haul) or internal to you (your router, LAN or WLAN).

You probably need to disable the DMZ setting for a while, to get a better picture of the external behaviour. Then you fan decide whether to focus on WAN or something internal.

i've disabled DMZ for now.

That should make things clearer, and also reduce the amount of random traffic. The router will drop random stuff better than the PC probably and thus reduce load on the wireless segment too.

DMZ is a measure of absolute last resort.

Good to know.

As a side note, unfortunately my chart seems to have stopped working and is just reporting 100% packet loss. I removed DMZ before it started 100% packet lossing and I don't recall changing any other settings, particularly the firewall etc. Not sure why its just suddenly broke.

In other news, it was horrendous yesterday, I've woken up and its relatively back to normal again.. time to see when it all goes to pot again.

This is because the PC was doing the replies before, so it now needs the router and its firewall to be configured to respond to pings from the Internet.

Alright, just did some fiddling and it looks like we're back.

Live chart
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/f5185ba6dc4...

It's still pretty stable right now.

For the record, I tried another router and modem yesterday to see if it made a difference - absolutely no difference at all. I've gone back to my super router (HG635) after that failed experiment. (my previous fibre setup was a BT open reach modem and a talktalk router, thought it would be ideal to test)

The good news is it'll be interesting to see how the chart develops considering all traffic rather than just my pc.

And we're back to massive latency again.

Stats at 1pm when it was fine;
http://i.imgur.com/LxmoBMr.png

Stats at 6pm, an hour after it went back to its usual latency problem;
http://i.imgur.com/n3m1t1B.png

Now the latency issue isn't showing on the graph now, making it look like the router is acting fairly normal?
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/f5185ba6dc4...
It still confuses me as everyone else is having issues with the internet in the house. I could do with testing a laptop plugged into the router to see if its getting the same latency issues.

To me this seems like general WIFI issues which could be cuased by a number of things for example baby monitors, wireless door bells and so on. Best thing to do is see how it works when wired in

Looks like wifi issue particularly on the 2.4GHz band, this can be a very congested bit of frequency depending on the devices mentioned, plus the number of wireless networks in the area.

Well, I'll throw a curveball here and state that I was experiencing the same high latency.. even with a laptop plugged into my router... It makes no sense.

I used Teamspeak, a VoIP program which has a really good connection quality monitor built in. I also ran several speed tests through wired and wireless. When I first plugged it in wired on teamspeak, I was getting 20ms ping and it was perfect, after 5 minutes.. it went up to 200-400ms and to its usual laggy self again. I tried again on wireless and it was a very similar result - all I had to do was run a speed test and the latency stayed out the roof even after the test was complete. It's like any 'hard work' it has to do knocks it into high latency mode and it rarely recovers, lol.

Tried resetting the router again and even unplugged everything - it did go back to 20ms briefly before rocketing up to 200ms+.

I turned off the coordless phone nearby and there's no difference. I can't think of any other appliances in the house that could be interfering so badly.

Wifi channels in the area;
http://i.imgur.com/QGyM0t0.png

As for my thinkbroadband chart.. it reports everything like its all normal. There are 3 red spikes this evening, but that was when I unplugged the router etc. I tried changing DNS servers today as well just to see if it made any difference but it didn't.

as an FYI, my PC network adapter doesn't pick up the 5GHz band... although the family is on iphones/ipads which use it and they report that pages load slow as if something is hogging bandwidth/bad signal.

But again, let me reiterate the fact sort of problem happens every few months.. so -normally-, the load times are fine and everything is flawless, no latency issues, no nothing.

I'll see what its like tomorrow and if it plummets back into latency issues at 5pm i'll post my findings on the talktalk community forum and try to get some official support on this as well. Thanks for all your guys' help so far. I'd still appreciate any suggestions.

current stats;
http://i.imgur.com/fnbMyDm.png (although i did reset router a few hours ago so these show less errors than in earlier posts)

Upstream noise safety coefficient (dB):
7.3
Downstream noise safety coefficient (dB):
6.3
Upstream interleave depth:
0
Downstream interleave depth:
0
Line standard:
VDSL
Upstream line attenuation (dB):
12.5
Downstream line attenuation (dB):
6.3
Upstream output power (dBm):
-1.7
Downstream output power (dBm):

Edited by deleted (Wed 10-Jun-15 22:43:18)

Is this all on the same device connected to your internet with nothing else connected to the internet?

No, the pc is in my room and I used a laptop for the wired testing.

I've just plugged it my laptop in again to test it and the latency isn't showing any issues like it did before, yet my PC is still sky rocketing. 300ms+ ping.

I've decided to post my findings on talktalk's support forums to get some more support on the issue;
https://community.talktalk.co.uk/t5/Superpowered-Fib...

As another quick experiment, I told everyone in the house to put their phone on aeroplane mode, including two ipads, just to see if one of them was causing such high latency... I ran a pingtest when all devices were off the network and got this;
http://www.pingtest.net/result/124876072.png


Be advised that all of the ping tests I've posted were over WiFi.

Talktalk will probably just conclude wifi problems and suggest using wired as mich as possible

your original post possibly describes a broadcast storm, whereby something on your internal network is causing a loop or not properly handling broadcast packets.

This manifests itself as a mass of broadcast traffic that will saturate your LAN completely, just like a DDoS attack.

If you are using any form of wifi extender.. don't.. they are the most significant cause of this.

also check you do not have a device with wifi and cable connection connected at the same time.

bill

It does seem primarily to be a wifi problem, yes. I'm looking into trying out powerlines for my PC to at least get off the wifi. Problem is though, every other device such as phones/ipads etc are still wireless and getting told to 'get wired' won't help them

Kijoma thanks for the informative reply, it does sound like thats happening. I'm happy to report I'm not using a wifi extender. My PC is the only thing with wired/wireless possibility and i'm just using wifi for now, all other adapters are disabled. On the early posts though thats when the broadband monitor was just monitoring my PC. Its had a good 24hrs on just monitoring my router now and its literally not reporting any problems. (spikes of red were when it was rebooted a few times)

--------------

Edit 12.06.15 #2 and possible solution

I've just bought 500mbps powerlines and plugged them in. As I disconnected my high latency wifi and enabled my LAN once more, my ping is now 19ms +- 1.6.
Speed test;
http://i.imgur.com/hePUaEk.png
Ping;
http://www.pingtest.net/result/124922982.png


I'll have to see how it goes now for me. I'm just wondering if it was my PC that was prehaps stuck in a 'broadcast storm', dragging every other device into slowless. Who knows.

I'll be monitoring my connection and see how everyone elses devices perform now my PC is off the wifi. If anyone can shine some light on the current router stats still, I'd appreciate it. It'll be interesting to see if its still reporting send errors on my super router wireless stats page.

Edited by deleted (Fri 12-Jun-15 16:08:07)

In reply to a post by Wolves42:

If anyone can shine some light on the current router stats still, I'd appreciate it. It'll be interesting to see if its still reporting send errors on my super router wireless stats page.

It is interesting that the wireless stats show a problem with "send errors", but like a lot of statistics, it doesn't help you understand *why*.

I guess it is likely that the error counter comes from the WiFi chipset, and reports the packets that never got sent out over the air because they never got approval through the CSMA mechanism. If that happens, it suggests something else is transmitting in a way that doesn't let your packets out, or delays them significantly. That "something" may well be a rogue wifi box that isn't obeying the rules. Or perhaps it is something that isn't wifi, and is just stomping across the spectrum.

Had you tried changing channels?

As the problem seemed to extend to a wired LAN connection, but still didn't affect the WAN (I think **), suggests that your LAN is getting overloaded. Perhaps you needed to be running some simple, long-lived, ping tests within the LAN.

I once encountered a problem where the LAN was being hogged ... by a network-attached printer.

** BTW: Your links to your BQM's are all ones to the live graph. As I come to this thread a few days later, I'm not able to see what the graphs showed a few days ago, so can't comment on them. It is usually better to post a link to the graph for the specific day, rather than the live graph, so they remain visible later...

Just thought I'd 'close' this thread by stating after being on powerlines for over a month now I've had 0 issues. None of this wifi interference to worry about ever again. It's such a relief!