Brutal latency/ping Recently

[t27c]

I am wired, with the gigabit package and all of the sudden have gotten constant ping spikes for over the last few days. I haven't been able to play any games online because the crazy ping spikes and latency make it completely unplayable. My speeds are what they are expected to be, no issues there. I have tried hard wiring straight into the modem but alas, the issue still persists. I have tried switching cables, power cycling my devices, factory resetting my devices. The issue still persists. I have called and contacted Rogers multiple times and they say everything seems fine on their end. But still, the issue persists and is steady. resulting in me not able to use any of my gaming devices due to the brutal and constant ping spikes. It's frustrating paying over $100 a month for internet I cant use for the things I want it for. Any help or suggestions are welcomed and appreciated. Thank you

*** Edited Labels ***

[JJSG]

I spoke to a tech today and they gave me the following response: "there has been numerous reports of this happening in different areas. I am not seeing any extreme results right now in any test I'm running but I know it is intermittent. We will need to escalate a trouble ticket to our engineering team to investigate this further on our end as we are collecting the examples."  and that "the issue is widespread between Ontario and even out to Newfoundland but it's sporadic and not effecting everyone in any specific area or neighbourhood." As they mentioned the problem is sporadic, this might be why G and others I've spoken too aren't seeing the same issues. 

This is the first tech I spoke to that confirmed that an issue exists, so Rogers may be aware of the issue now. Let's hope for the best. They also mentioned this problem may take longer than usual to fix but could not specify a timeline. I signed up for updates, so I will post here when I receive one. 

[herrshaun]

@JJSG Signed up for updates where? Was it something through your tech, or can I get in on that?

[-G-]

Sorry if I'm sounding unsympathetic or if you think that I'm trying to cast doubt on any of the problems that you are all reporting.  That is NOT my intention.

There's DEFINITELY a real problem.  I've seen it and I can confirm what you have been seeing.

Today, I am no longer seeing the ping spikes that I saw over the weekend.  I'm only speaking for myself and about the quality of my own service, nothing more, nothing else.  I truly would like to see the Rogers Internet service get back to being consistent and reliable, for everybody.  I would also REALLY like to find out what has been causing this issue.

I also think that this same issue may also be causing all sorts of problems for a number of Ignite TV customers as well, who are seeing audio and video freezes despite tech support not being able to see any problems with the signal to their modems, the quality of their Wi-Fi, or any other problems with their equipment.

I would like to see this problem get fixed, for everybody's sake.

[JJSG]

@herrshaun It was through the tech/support on the online chat actually. I'd recommend going through the online support at https://www.rogers.com/consumer/support/contactus and describing your issue. They told me that they have been getting lots of reports about latency/ping spikes/packet loss recently and they will escalate a ticket on my account and others that will hopefully eventually go to the engineers. I received the option from support to give my cell number to them and I will receive updates on the situation/ticket via text. They also mentioned they have been able to resolve this issue for some, but I will wait to see what happens with my Internet before reporting back.

I agree with you on the second part. There is some useful information on here (from Datalink), but you will definitely have more success communicating directly with Rogers. 

[herrshaun]

@JJSG I got a similar statement from a chat support agent, and the "update" I got basically boiled down to "we pinged your modem for 10 seconds and it looked fine, ticket closed". Here's hoping you have better luck than I did.

[Datalink]

@herrshaun thank you for that.  Please do not include myself or any of the other Resident Experts in your category of being present just to keep up appearances.  The REs are customers and volunteers who don't mind spending the time to assist other customers whenever and wherever we can.  The main point to keep in mind is that we're not Rogers employees.  We are volunteers on a forum where we believe and think that we can be of assistance to other customers.  As volunteers we don't have access to the system or to customer accounts, that's for everyone's protection.  Unfortunately, as we don't have system access, that also means that we don't have the ability to run tests that might help to determine what some of the issues are that are affecting performance of a customers internet systems.  We can do a lot thru coaching and direction which enables customers to run their own testing and modification of equipment settings, but, at the end of the day, its up to the individual customers to accomplish those steps and when necessary contact technical support or reach out to the moderators thru @CommunityHelps.  And at the end of the day, as is pointed out by the moderators, this is mainly a customer supported (thru volunteers), customer support forum with limited support by the moderators. 

My personal wish is to see more technical support by the engineering staff, network ops staff and others.  This could absolutely be a rocking forum with additional support, and that doesn't mean dedicating individuals from the various departments to this forum. A couple of hours here, a couple of hours there, by staff members who can instantly recognize a problem, pick up the phone at a moments notice and contact the right person would go a long way.  This forum or any forum like it is a great place to keep the company ear to the ground, so to speak,  and determine what the current day problems are.  The question is, is Rogers willing to make that effort.  Can't answer that as I don't work for Rogers. 

At the present time, personal opinion, we need someone from the Network Operations Center to watch the forum postings and use those posts to track down affected modems and CMTS equipment in real time.  That's pretty easy to do.  Allow a dedicated staff member to correspond directly with the customers based on what's posted.  That works, there is no doubt about it.  Just a matter of commitment from Rogers.  

I can see that I'm going to have to create a series of test steps to collect data on ICMP, TCP/IP and UDP response times and losses.  Hopefully with more customer data, there will be a little more clarity around the ongoing problems.   

If as has been indicated, that Rogers is doing some kind of maintenance that has resulted in the ongoing chaos, without warning the users, well that's would be a good example of how not to run a major change that affects your customers.  I'll only believe that when all of the details shake out in the wash, as they say.  There would have to be significant equipment changes and significant difficulties in accomplishing that change in order to result in what some customers are currently experiencing.  Sometimes that happens.  Despite all of the planning and preparation that you might have done, the equipment arrives onsite and installation simply doesn't go according to plan due to unforeseen and unknown issues.  Stuff happens ...... 😞

[herrshaun]

@Datalink Here's the thing. I appreciate that you're taking time out of your own schedule to talk with customers and guide them to a resolution, saving them the burden of the chain of support. I understand that you're trying to be helpful.

But here's what's not helpful: In a thread full of frustrated people who are all dealing with the same issue a month later, suggesting troubleshooting they would have tried on day one. Doing your own ping test during good hours, shrugging your shoulders and telling people "looks fine to me, I don't know why people are complaining". 

Again, I'm not singling you out, but in this and other threads, I've seen a complete disregard of the issue at hand from Rogers posters. When someone doesn't even bother to try to understand the issue at hand, even when the person tells them verbatim, it's pretty obvious that they're not really there to help at all.

[RogersCorey]

Greetings @herrshaun!

We are here to help and believe me, we're losing sleep over this issue. This latency issue has become the number one concern for @RogersAndy and I.

We are hard at work in the background on this and things are moving. Understand that even if you have done your own tests, we may need you to perform a fresh set of tests for us.

What I would ask going forward is that we focus on the issue at hand. We can't have our users arguing with one another in this thread.

Please Keep it Courteous.

You can review our User Guidelines here: http://bit.ly/CommunityForumGuidelines and Terms of Use here: http://bit.ly/TermsUse

Should you have any specific concerns please send a PM to CommunityHelps or contact us via Twitter @RogersHelps or on Facebook.com/Rogers. You may also use the Share a Concern option here: http://roge.rs/Jvge0i

Thanks for your contribution and for your help in keeping the community a pleasant place to be.

RogersCorey

[-V-]

I am glad I found this post because I've been spending the whole of last month just pulling out my hair thinking it was some connection on my end as I really do not want to contact support as I always get the run-around answers.
I have tried everything from resetting the router, turning it off for 5mins and turning it back on. Connecting the computer directly to the router, etc. Nothing seems to work.
I am in the GTA and playing online games has seem to be brutal and almost unplayable. At times, it would seem the connection is perfectly fine without any changes and other times my latency would be horrible.
Last night was just as bad trying to watch Netflix, you would keep getting the loading for 5-10 seconds before the connection is fast again.
Anyways, I hope this gets fixed soon whatever is causing this issue.

[Swifty00]

OK - Finally a plausible solution on my problem.

Looks like a Rogers are building/splitting a node in our area and moving us over. Reports from a couple of people in our area are that this is working for them.

This has taken a long lime, but it really does fit the evidence pattern on all our problems.  First time in 4 weeks that I am hopeful of a fix.

[sbenninger]

I have not read the entire thread but this is indeed a Rogers network issue that has been ongoing sine the outage on Feb 23rd. Not sure if a failed upgrade or core routing equipment failure but definitely their issue. No amount of local troubleshooting will correct it. My ping monitor as well as many others on here show the high pings starting at the first hop default gateway which is on Rogers network. It reminds me of an issue I had on old switch gear where the switch would flush and relearn the ARP table at a certain interval causing the CPU to hit 100% and cause latency at those times. Not saying that is the issue here but something in their core is at fault. It is also affecting the TPIA providers as well.

I also had a support chat last week and they said the "area issue" was resolved so must me a local issue. Tech arrived and left with the spikes continuing. I think this past Friday night and last night were the best 2 days since the outage on the 23rd. Sunday was brutal though.

Most users will not even know their is an issue...only Online Gamers and VPN users will really see the negative affects of the ping spikes.

It would be nice if they at least put out some sort of notice or acknowledgement of the issue and that they are working on it. At the very least keep their support reps updated on the status. 

On a positive note I see clean plots since last night so hopefully they have a long term resolution in place.

[herrshaun]

@RogersCorey I appreciate your response and I'm sorry for being so confrontational, but understand that I have been dealing with this for over a month now. I have spoken to multiple techs and support agents, and have not heard the same story twice. When this happens, I'm sure you can imagine how frustrated someone gets.

I will tone down the callousness, but if you are working in the background and things are indeed "moving", what I and the other people dealing with this issue would really appreciate is some transparency on this issue. Give us updates on the issue so we can feel like Rogers is actually doing something. This can make the difference between a continued customer, or someone who's going to jump ship to Bell or something (like a couple of people have apparently already done).

[antennabeams]

Yesterday, I was told to exchange my modem after troubleshooting via social media.

I did that, and the issue persists. Social media support creates a case file for engineering, says they'll get back to me within 48hrs.

This morning I get an automated call that my issue is fixed. I run a ping test right away, it's NOT FIXED.

Ran another one just now, and ...well..see for yourself.

https://pastebin.com/jjnGmt4c 
Dropped packets, ping spikes in the thousands. Same ISSUE.

In addition, my upload seems to be severely impacted -- even trying to upload a 80MB file to several different production tools (one owned by Google (GSuite/google drive, the other not) results in a 10+minute upload time. Usually this takes a fraction of the time.  Uploading a 300MB file took 45minutes. Insanity (I'm on Gigabit, should be 30mbit up, but that's nowhere close).

Ping seems to spike harder when upstream activity is occurring, but honestly it's impacted the same way with any network activity going on (that includes, seemingly, uploading a file, playing a online game, and even just the ping testing itself). This is not normal and now its impacting my ability to work.  

When will this be properly fixed?  My case is not fixed, clearly.

[sbenninger]

I was thinking the issues were upload related as well but have not had a chance to test and confirm the theory.

Rogers wouldn't be attempting to enable Docsis 3.1 on the upstream channels causing all of these issues would they? 

[herrshaun]

@antennabeams They test for about 10 minutes when determining whether an issue is fixed. You can't give them exact times that the service gets bad because they don't care. I went through the same thing and was told they were "unable to find an issue" because they did a ping test 8 hours later. 

It sounds like you're right where the rest of us are - sitting in the dark, trying to determine which of the 4 or 5 different explanations we get is the correct one, while Rogers does whatever (if anything) in the background.

[Swifty00]

I have to say this seems like a classic case of Bufferbloat.

You can test it here - I get an A+ for Quality and a D for bufferbloat.

http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest

Basically the traffic management on the network is slowing down the throughput to a point that it backs up the traffic too much.  Actual throughput is fine, but the first packet in a frame is being held up while it awaits management/metering. Once your 10 GB download is cleared, it blazes through, but small gaming frames or pings, have to wait every time to be checked and they can back up in the buffer.

[-G-]

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@sbenninger wrote:

I was thinking the issues were upload related as well but have not had a chance to test and confirm the theory.

Rogers wouldn't be attempting to enable Docsis 3.1 on the upstream channels causing all of these issues would they? 

---

Who knows.  It could be a bug in a software update (preparing for this?) that causes a piece of network gear to stop forwarding packets (correctly) every so often...  the kind of bug that only triggers in the real-world, not testing in the lab.  In my case, it was "only" for a few seconds at a time, and I typically didn't get much (if any) packet loss so it's likely that this occurred at the network edge.

[Swifty00]

<a href="http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest/60167232"><img src="http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest/60167232.png"></a>

[mrdiu]

Using Hitron 4582U, hard wired. Within the last 2 weeks, Overwatch has been unplayable. Going into the game, I'm sitting at 45ms, then it constantly bumps up to 115ms, and goes down to 45. Happens so frequently, I can hear the gun shots going off when I click, but then its actually not shooting, I have to click the mouse a second time. Quite annoying. After dropping rank in Overwatch, only yesterday, I began to tether my phones internet to play games, and thank god it's not with Rogers. Zero issues whatsoever when tethered, but I should not need to use my cells data as a workaround.

[mrdiu]

I'm in Mississauga Heartland.

[Willy223]

in brampton! queen and hansen area. can't play any video games cause of bad ping and packet loss for quite some time now