someone should print this section and drop it off at the office of the president.
Maybe than they decide to get their act together and fix this
I've had enough - just pulled the trigger and signed up for Virgin Mobile. I'll be going from 300mbps down to 100mbps, but I can live with that in order to trade for stable latency.
What else is there to do when PingPlotter looks like this more often than not: https://imgur.com/a/99PAVBl
I'm so happy I found this thread... I've been suffering from the exact same issues for the past 4-5 weeks as everyone in here has described. I've been through 5x multi-hour support calls, 1 tech visit, and a supervisor escalation on a call. None of that helped and most ended with, please restart your modem, they blamed bridge mode / 3rd party router, and said nothing from their end looks bad and noise levels on the line are fine.
I've had the same Rogers plan (gigabit), and network configuration for the past 3+ years, and it was absolutely fine, in the last 4-5 weeks however I am experiencing the same intermittent ping spikes and massive latency issues. Sometimes it seems its okay for hours and I can game, download, stream whatever as normal and then magically it'll go bonkers without any reason and last for hours or sometime days, then go away again. I seem to be able to exacerbate the problem by saturating my line via speed test and large downloads to get the pings to spike into insanely high ranges (2000+), not sure how much of that has to do with bufferbloat but given that there has been zero configuration change on my end and everything was smooth sailing for years, I am convinced that it has nothing to do with anything behind my router, or the fact that I'm running bridge mode with a 3rd party router.
My Details:
- Rogers Gigabit Plan (Toronto, Regent Park - Corktown area)
- DOCSIS 3.1 CODA-4582U modem (in bridge mode)
- Asus RT-AC86U Router (running asuswrt-merlin 384.13)
- Computers are connected to router with gigabit Ethernet (non of the testing was done via wifi clients)
Symptoms:
- Intermittent Latency Spikes, either at random times without any discernible pattern or while the line is under load (and I'm not talking maxing out a gigabit connecting, if my wife starts watching youtube on her tablet or some other regular user internet activity I start getting crazy rubber banding in Overwatch, etc.)
- Full timeout / drops at times that can last several seconds upto several minutes before everything reconnects.
- Given the intermittent nature of this, its been quite difficult to catch it when its happening and to call support at that time so maybe they can diagnose what is happening.
History:
- Started noticing this about 4-5 weeks ago, had zero issues with the service until then (unless there was a neighborhood issue or node downtime in the area)
- 1st call to tech support (sometime in early Feb?) they were able to identify some noise on the line and scheduled a technician visit (which was 4 days after the call). The issues totally disappeared in the days following the call and when the tech arrived and checked the noise, signal, speed test, etc, all was fine and he essentially didn't do anything and left saying it must have been solved.
- The issues in the same pattern return a few days after that
- 2nd call to tech support (mid feb?) I was only able to get through to an agent when the ping spikes were settling down and they were not able to identify any issues on the line and that didn't lead anywhere.
- 3rd call to tech support (early march - 5th / 6th?) the connection was experiencing a rather bad case of latency and ping spikes for several hours, and I managed to land an agent that seemed quite knowledgeable on networking terminology and did do their due diligence to help other then just reading off the steps of reboot modem, its your router, etc. etc. I explained the situation to him and the difficulty in diagnosing it given its intermittent nature, and unless he ran his test RIGHT when it was happening he won't see anything wrong on the line. Finally on his 3rd or 4th test he was able to catch the modem pinging well over 1000ms for a while. The agent validated that was not normal and that this can be escalated to their network support/maintenance team. I asked him to please enter extensive notes that if whoever this gets escalated to doesn't catch the issue while its happening, the line will seem fine and to please run the tests for a large block of time, he noted everything down and sent it off.
- Got an automated text from Rogers on Wednesday the 11th that a ticket has been opened "This is a message from Rogers. Thank you for contacting us on 03/11/2020 to report a problem with your Rogers Internet Service. We've created case number Cxxxxxxxxxx to ensure the issue gets fixed."
- Got an update on Wednesday the 12th that the ticket was closed: "Rogers Msg: Thanks for reporting a problem with your Rogers Internet Service. We have been unable to identify an issue at this time. If you're still having an issue, please contact us and quote case number Cxxxxxxxxxxx."
- Issues continued to persist in the days following, I made the 4th call to Rogers last night (March 13th) when once again the latency and ping spikes returned for a good 3-4 hour period in the evening. First agent was not helpful, and I escalated it to a supervisor, who once again tried to blame it on the bridge mode, and claimed nothing was wrong from their end when he did the tests. I spoke to the supervisor for over an HOUR regarding why it is difficult to diagnose this issue. Some interesting points during the conversation:
- He claimed that even if they manage to identify high pings on the line, its more then likely an issue with my router and not their infrastructure. I asked him the specifics of their test, and he told me that from his console he can ping my modem to receive results. After he confirmed this I explained how ICMP echo packets work, and that my firewall doesn't respond ping requests, or any form of reply for that matter. So IF he is getting a response (which he confirmed he was) that response is coming from my Rogers modem WAN interface, not passing through the bridge-mode and coming from the router. This essentially removes the router from the scenario completely as the response he is getting is from a device in front of my LAN. Unfortunately he didn't seem to understand this and held firm on his claim that its my router, or the client devices inside my LAN.
- I asked if there is a way to escalate this to someone with networking background, and he said there is zero way to move a conversation past customer support / tier1 technical support.
- Finally reached (or so I thought) some progress when we started talking about trace routes, and that he can't rely on pings to escalate this issue, but if I can get him tracert logs showing that rogers infrastructure past my router is pinging high on those hops (before they) leave rogers network, he would be able to use that to open a ticket. I asked how I can send him these results, and he told me to open an e-chat support with Rogers and the agent on that end can receive files, and attach them to my account / ticket for someone to review.
- I gathered 2 hours worth of tracert traffic and logs, to 4 different sources so they take different paths (google.ca, apple.ca, cbc.ca, and the front facing IP of the US Central Overwatch server). I opened an echat support and explained to the agent what the supervisor asked me to do. Here is the response: (Removed Chat Log - RogersTony)
- (Apologies, didn't know pasting chat logs was prohibited) I will summarize the response if that is okay? I was told by the rep that it is not possible to send screen captures / logs via e-chat and they have no way of attaching it to an account/ticket number. Extremely frustrating from a customers end.
Things I've tried:
- Rebooting / Power Cycling both modem and router.
- Changing Ethernet cable between router and modem.
- Reconnecting Coax cable to modem.
- Enabling QoS on the router and following the multiple guides out there that try to remedy bufferbloat (but im not even sure this is bufferbloat as I get A+ rating on DSLreports, etc. with QoS OFF, and get far worse bufferbloat rating with QoS on)
- Caping my bandwidth at 50% of what I get on speedtests from fast.com / speedtest.net
Screenshots and Logs:
Latency patterns visualized overtime from a wired PC to the network, results are the same from a second PC testing, removing a single client computer as the point of failure. The graphs were taken over multiple days and hours experiencing the different types of latency issues and patterns:
And of course, as of this morning, no change other then a good nights rest on my end, everything is fine!
Here is the latency spike reproduced from the router itself, removing and client issue, bad Ethernet cable in the LAN, etc.
Traceroute screen captures, a random selection to different destinations showing a latency spike on hops that belong to Rogers (this is what the supervisor asked me to do):
If anyone is interested in the raw text logs from the traces (google.ca, apple.ca, cbc.ca, and the front facing IP of the US Central Overwatch server), more then happy to host them and let people take a look.
Conclusion:
None really? other then 'something' has changed in the last 3-5 weeks that is causing these network issues on rogers infrastructure, and their entry level technical support either refuse to admit it, or do not have the knowledge to assist in troubleshooting unique issues. If I am missing anything, or am misinterpreting my data in anyway, please let me know. I am happy to continue troubleshooting this with the community, and hopefully Rogers will see this, and this issue will get some more exposure.
From a customer perspective, many of us, myself included are paying for the highest tier internet package provided by Rogers, and cannot even game, stream, properly use the connection in a reliable way. This is absolutely unacceptable and needs to be addressed.
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