Bt Smarthub 2 to DrayTek 130

[Bert]

This could be an issue with your ISP's network rather than your home system. It's unlikely that any sort of bufferbloat setting would fix it in that scenario.

 

On that last pingplotter pic hub 4 and 7 seem to give issues, 4 packet loss and 7 high latency.

 

I have something similar in The Netherlands. There is 2 serverclouds in Amsterdam hosting BO4 games. One is run by Vultr and fed by the NTT backbone. And the other is Internap fed by the Congent backbone. One of the Congent hubs is giving mega ping spikes, this is visible in DumaOS and in Pingplotter. The Vultr cloud however is totally fine. 

[ArcaPulse]

I have it set to always. I’ll run the test when I get home from work at 8:45 tonight.

the draytek is arriving tomorrow so I could try that as well. 

I was playing Fifa if you were wondering but on bo4 the lag was there as well.

[ArcaPulse]

Got my brother to run the tests.

heres the BT router one

[ArcaPulse]

Here’s the netduma one.

[Netduma Fraser]

Okay that all looks fine, thanks for that. So ISP/line look fine and the router does as well so it's probably down to QoS. Instead of using the passthrough could you use DMZ instead? It should be in the Firewall settings of the hub, after that make sure everything is connected to the router and see if it makes things any better.

[ArcaPulse]

For all these tests netduma has been in the hubs DMZ and the firewall on the hub has been disabled.

[Netduma Fraser]

Oh I thought you were doing IP Passthrough. In that case I would wait to see if the draytek helps at all, your QoS settings seem fine to me but would be ideal to use that guide to narrow in on perhaps a better percentage going in levels of 5, even going up towards to 100 not just down. If the 20/30 you said is best then maybe find the second best which may not be 70%.

[ArcaPulse]

Ok great I will update tomorrow. One last thing, having my PC added in with the unigine engine and battlefield in traffic priotisation seemed to decrease the connection quality even when not being used. Also having duma OS classified on makes it worse. Lastly, simply turning my Xbox on last night saw a massive increase in my brothers ping even when just on the home screen with no download or anything going on.

[Netduma Alex]

It might decrease the connection quality of other devices as it attempts to forward traffic to the device you've prioritized.

[ArcaPulse]

But as I have the Xbox set as a priority device surely that should mean it shouldn’t get degraded connection?

The DrayTek has arrived and is all set up with the internet through the Duma. Are there any tests you’d like me to run? Or should I just play as normal and maybe report at the end of the week how it’s been?

one other thing, before with the smart hub we couldn’t get BT sport to work on the smart TV from the netduma, do you know how I can set this up to work?

[Netduma Alex]

I'm assuming that the BT sport problem is an intentional incompatibility from BT's end, as in, they made it so that it will only work with their own routers. There might be steps we can take to get it working, i'll have to do some research on that though.

I'd put anti-bufferbloat back to a default level (70% maybe) and then see if you experience problems over the next few days.

[ArcaPulse]

Ok perfect, i returned the chromecast and got an Apple TV instead as we all have apple devices and the chromecast seems really buggy with connecting with them. 

if you find a fix for BT sport that would be amazing as it would mean all the extra channels would come back (Bt sport is the main one we use hence the need for the Apple TV, but having the others available would be super nice.) 

Ill update in a few days.

[ArcaPulse]

There has been some improvement. The game is still noticably laggy and puts me at a disadvantage still. However the 200ms ping spikes seem to be gone which makes the game go from completely unplayable to unenjoyable due to the connection. Here's the ping graph and the network usage. The exact things that were actively being used were my xbox playing fifa, my PC idle on the duma OS, my brothers PC playing overwatch and in a discord call, my mum browsing the internet on her ipad and my dad browsing BBC Sport on his iPad. 4 phones are connected to the internet not being used but getting notifications, an apple TV not used, a google home mini, 2 TV boxes not streaming internet TV and 4 laptops closed.

I was using the pictured QOS settings in the previous picture, I tried 85,80,75,70,65,60 percent anti-bufferbloat but the results were all still the same with the poor ping.

Note: My brother has less frequent noticable ping spikes, i think due to the nature of fifa with little anti-lag aid, any change in ping is noticable. However he does say often that his ping will spike to 50-95ms and stay there for 5-10 seconds fairly often when he's playing.

[Netduma Fraser]

Okay so that is promising, could you disable IPv6 as well as Traffic Prioritization completely please. It may be it's prioritizing higher bandwidth applications which could cause this. 

[ArcaPulse]

So played a game, was soo smooth for the most part, maybe 10-20 lag spikes but so much better than before. However I can't tell if that's due to my parents going to bed or the new settings. There are two screenshots with 1 showing what it looked like most the game and the other when a lag spike occured.

Would you like me to do a ping plotter tomorrow with a few youtube videos playing at the same time?

[Netduma Fraser]

That seems a lot better, in that particular instance it could just be a spike from the server itself not necessarily your connection. Yes that would be good thank you!

[ArcaPulse]

So it looks bad, but compared to the results with the hub they're much better and seems to follow the trend found with the fifa ping. There's still problems but the spikes aren't as high as before. I only ran for a couple of mins as the results were pretty conclusive. That was 2 youtube videos at 1080p and netflix being streamed. I see I cut off the ping values, the start of yellow is 100ms and the bottom is 0ms. Each bar is 20ms.

[Netduma Alex]

Okay so now I guess you need to adjust your bufferbloat settings again to reduce those spikes.

[ArcaPulse]

I know a little bit about bufferbloat, but what's the benefit of having effectively dead bandwidth? Surely having it as close to 100 would be better? I would have thought having it around 90 would be good to account for any ISP throtteling while also having the ability the have the max bandwidth.

[Netduma Alex]

Well the aim is to have it as high as you can while still getting good ping in games. At that point, you'd set it to activate only "when high priority traffic detected", meaning that your bandwidth would only be reduced when you were playing games. Remember that bandwidth is not important for having good gameplay, only ping matters.

Now of course when you're downloading patches for games, bandwidth is important.

[ArcaPulse]

ok, so I know Fraser said to disable ipv6 and all traffic prioritisation before, should I now re-enable traffic prioritisation but input it manually, maybe for just my games console and leave both mine and my brothers PCs unprioritised?

[Netduma Alex]

That could work, and if you do choose to prioritize the computers, you should be selective about the ports that are prioritized. A PC will do a lot of background networking stuff that you probably don't want to be prioritized.

[ArcaPulse]

Ok I’ll try both configurations and get back to you.

[ArcaPulse]

Now this may sound silly, but I’ll google the ports of the games, but then when I go to manually input them there’s the source port and destination port. Which one do I input the values to?

i also played PC games with the suitable prioritisation profile selected, however it still didn’t improve,  the duma didn’t pick up that they was high priority traffic, it always does though with the Xbox as soon as it’s turned on.

[Netduma Fraser]

Leave the source ports as is and put those ports in destination. DumaOS Classified Games covers console completely so you don't need to use specific ports. Ports would be better for PC and should then trigger the prioritization correctly.