Broadband Latency Issues

[Krl45]

I have had a new router, new master socket and I'm still experiencing latency issues - see below. Ping the bbc will have 17ms for 5 pings in a row and then suddenly starts shooting up in the hundreds and thousands. What the heck is going on? No one in Sky seems to know. They see speed as everything and not quality. But this quality effects everything that isn't buffered! BT engineer said something about static in the cabinet but who knows? Does anyone have any ideas? 

I

[mae-3]

@Krl45 

It looks like downstream or upstream saturation owning to the latency increase only during use. Can you post the router stats whilst using the broadband connection as usual?

[Krl45]

Thank you for answering my plea.

My router statistics below

[mae-3]

@Krl45 

It is saturation because you are a far distance from the cabinet with only 26Mbps downstream and more importantly only 1.5Mbps upstream. Until fibre is available to the premises you are stuck with that latency issue owing to use over a VDSL2 working at a distance which dictates the low speeds you are getting, eg: you are using all the capacity basically, unfortunately.

[Krl45]

Thank you for your quick response. 

The funny thing is that it hasn't always been this bad. Yes its been slow but the latency issue has only been in the last six months. During the lock downs we would take it in turn with video calling which was okay but now with only 1 person video calling its interupted. Even wifi calling with my phone is suspect. I just have to hope Airband haven't gone bust before they do the install otherwise I'm going to be waiting another 2 years for BT to get around to doing the samething. 

[mae-3]

@Krl45 

Unfortunately, when the cabinet gets near or at capacity it is the broadband lines that are the furtherest from the cabinet that suffers drops in performance the most in percentage terms.

[Krl45]

Thank you that explains a lot

[jamesn123]

@Krl45 

Looks to me like a combination of your connection being saturated & using exclusively WiFi.

Since you only have a 1.5mbps upload speed the connection can easily be saturated by a single video call, background cloud upload, etc.

Also you seem to be only using WiFi for your devices which can cause an issue if you have bad WiFi interference in your area. You mentioned that the connection didnt always seem to be this bad, this could be that the WiFi conditions in your area have changed and you now have more interference from external factors. 

[mae-3]

@Krl45 

The latency wouldn't impact wireless on the WAN port it isn't involved in that equation which it is doing with the think broadband test which rules out wireless, and the only reason for this issue is broadband saturation.

It is always a common thought that wireless is the issue which it usually isn't in cases like yours because if it was the WAN port wouldn't become saturated for the speed wouldn;t reach higher enough because of interference, eg: speed is impacted not latency on WAN port.

[Krl45]

Thank you Jenson but I think Mae is on to something. High latency is more during the day in the graph above (to the modem not the computer nor booster). Yesterday my wife was at home all day on video calls, whereas I've done minimal downloading whilst working from home today (she's in the office today). She said the quality of her calls yesterday were rubbish. Her laptop sits 1ft away from the sky wifi/modem. The speed has always been low at 23/26mb but its the latency variation that I have an issue with. 

[jamesn123]

@Krl45 

Yes you'll always see that latency because your speed is fairly low. You dont have an ideal connection for working from home because any background process or concurrent task will immediately cause issues for any live applications like voice/video calls.