Extreme latency spikes at weird times - what to do?

[unknown_purpose]

Hello,

I've been having ongoing latency issues with Sky Broadband.

Most of the time, I get a ping of around 30ms to servers in the UK. However, sometimes the latency will spike up to 500ms. This will last for a hour or so before settling back down to 30ms. This makes my connection unusable for anything in near real-time (such as games). This happens most days and at unpredictable times.

I have spoken to Sky on the phone about this, but unfortunately, the rep didn't seem to understand what I was talking about.

Other points:

 - I am using a wired connection NOT wireless.

 - This is NOT correlated with peak usage times. I cannot find any correlation at all.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

[Chrisee]

@unknown_purpose I would suggest you set up a free Broadband Quality monitor on the is site https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality using your current public IP4 address. The server regularly pings your hub and records the round trip time and displays the results graphically if there are latency issues within Sky's network it will show them.

Although wifi issues are the most common cause of latency issues there are others in particular Sky hubs can begin to lag when very busy with multiple simultaenous users which particularly applies if the users are gaming while others are streaming video etc. No idea if that could be a factor in your case but if it is consider switching the free Sky hub for a third party router which offers facilities like QOS and has a more powerful processor.

[unknown_purpose]

Thank you for your help.

The results show some concerning things:

 - The latency spikes I have been experiencing are clearly visible in the "max latency" data

 - Packet loss hovers between 10%-20% (I was not aware of this!)

I think this indicates serious problems with the line?

[jamesn123]

Hi @unknown_purpose 

It would be useful to see your router stats