XR500 issues and latency, Frontier Fios Services.

[iTz Gandhi]

Hey guys, I've been lurking on these forums for a while now though this is only the second time I've posted. Let me start by saying thank you to anyone and everyone whom takes the time to read this, even if you don't know what to make of it, or haven't a piece of helpful information to put forward.

Let me also say I have learned so much about networking and technology over the last 3 years searching for a resolution to my problem, and for that I am thankful because I truly am passionate about technology and learning about the underlying mechanics that drive it and even allow it to operate. But with that said, I should have come here sooner looking for help but I'm stubborn and tend to be impatient, and posting in a forum to wait forever for a response seems unattractive as I have had not great experiences with posting on forums in general and receiving help. I'm also autistic and tend to be more of an introverted recluse, so asking for help isn't something that comes easy for me.

A brief foot note I'll add in an effort to be as through and helpful as possible. My services are internet only 300/300 symmetrical. Provider of course being Frontier. Network topology is very simple which is as follows, Alcatel Lucent i-211m-l ONT - Nighthawk XR500 - LAN. I've gone down the list of simple common sense troubleshooting recommendations you'd expect from anyone with even the slightest inkling into networking such as, eliminating the possibility of a bad Ethernet cable, running ping plotters to check for oddities in line activity, even doing line quality checks at dslreports.com, and to no avail. From all that I can tell with ping plotter line quality appears great as you'd expect on a fiber optic connection. I can share results of dslreports line quality test or ping plotter if requested, but again no indication as far as I can tell that anything is a miss. One thing I will say though that strikes me as odd, and having read extensively on NAT, especially enjoying the comprehensive and meticulously written article Badmodems has on the subject. Full Cone, Partial Cone, and Port Restricted NAT being the most common ways NAT is implemented, it confuses me that when I forward a port to say my phone to check if it's actually being opened, then do a port scan from say canuseeme, sometimes I get a LAN access from remote in the logs indicating to me that a connection to said port was at least attempted, sometimes I don't, but it never says on the other end that it was successful. It either always says connection timed out, or port closed. Even with NAT Filtering set to open. Which bothers me more than a little. I've also read a little about Teredo regarding Xbox and how Microsoft handles NAT and the implications of needing players to have the ability to connect to one another. I definitely have a few questions regarding that and possibly what Sony's version of Teredo is.

My problem has followed me across two ISP's and two routers for three years now. First with spectrum using a Nighthawk R7000, and a Arris Surfboard cable modem I purchased to entirely eliminate ISP equipment from the equation. Now with Frontier Fios, an Nighthawk XR500 and a direct connection to an Alcatel-Lucent i-211m-l ONT. The common denominator being Netgear Nighthawk routers. The issue I'm experiencing is strange to say the least. Every device I own and use I experience "lag" or latency when using said device. A list of those devices includes an Xbox one X, PlayStation 4 Pro, Asus ROG Phone 2, Razer Phone 2, Dell Laptop, and many more I won't arbitrarily list. Suffice it to say it's anything and everything I use. Alongside a very high latency when using any of these devices is a strange phenomenon, where I feel like things on the screen are almost warping and changing size, almost the way say a scaling feature would work. And with that also comes this odd two dimensional quality everything from games to YouTube videos exhibit. To elaborate on that a little more, as a for instance when I am not experiencing the issue (which is very rare) things look amazing in games, be it on my ROG phone 2 playing PUBG Mobile, or on my PlayStation 4 Pro playing Call of Duty. It's like the textures are so alive with depth and detail and the colours appear so much more vibrant, intricate, and present. Strangely enough, I would describe the issue I have with audio in a very similar manner, where all the detail and nuance is gone. I can't hear enemy players in things like PUBG Mobile or Call of Duty for the life of me (literally lol) until it's too late or I'm dead. Sensitivity in games is also very inconsistent, and never feels the same. Whether it's the touch screen of my phone, keyboard and mouse, or a controller. YouTube videos appear pixilated and blurry almost, lacking in visual and audible information. Players in games like Blackout and PUBG Mobile are very difficult for me to spot. And distances are very difficult to gauge, where it seems like things on the map, be it players or objects, appear farther away than they should be. Things like my wingsuit in Blackout are consistently pixelated and fail to properly render in. And lighting and shadows are also very strange with things appearing darker than they should be sometimes, like shaded areas and inside of buildings. Sometimes I'll walk into a structure for instance, like long barn in Blackout right beside red barn, by wagers and silo and it will be dark and oddly lit and suddenly the lighting will change where I can see and it's lit up the way it should be.

There are other oddities such as haptic feedback being horribly inconsistent across the board on every Android device I've owned in the last three years. And typing feels very slow and tedious, with what I would also describe as a "lag" or latency regarding the input of characters and haptic response to hitting a key. Again, when things are working properly the small percentile of the time they do, this is not the case and everything feels so responsive and it's effortless to type things out. And on a $1000.00usd phone sporting a Snapdragon 855+ , Adreno 640 GPU, Cortex A-76 architecture, and a prime core clock speed of 2,960 MHz, I would hope the very least I should expect to be a responsive keyboard lol ;D.

Anyway I've rambled long enough, and apologize for being long winded. To anyone who reads this, let me thank you once again for doing so regardless of whether you have some helpful piece of wisdom to offer or not. I'm at my wit's end with this issue and it's causing me to go to some very dark places psychologically, so any help is most certainly appreciated. Again from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

[Netduma Fraser]

Happy Holidays and I'm glad you decided to reach out for help. We're pretty good on this forum when it comes to support!

Some of the issues you've mention would indicate to me a problem with the device itself being able to render the environment but given the top quality of devices you're using that's confusing. Are all the devices maxing out their storage capacity? I wonder if doing something like a reinitialisation on the PS4 would resolve the issue, maybe something to consider though I doubt you'd want to essentially do a factory reset on every device to see if it works properly after that.

Your speeds are good so it's unlikely to be a congestion issue, unless all these devices are used simultaneously? When you're experiencing one of these issues have a look on the network monitor, is anything using a significant amount of bandwidth? Are you using QoS or the Geo-Filter on the router at all?

[iTz Gandhi]

Hey Fraser, sorry I took so long to get back with you. Holidays have been a race to the finish. I have factory reset everything from my router to my phone and PS4 multiple times to no avail. Few questions in an attempt to figure out what's going on. 1. Can Google account/activity settings have any impact on the performance of a device or any of this? Suspicious of that maybe being a factor. Though I don't care about privacy implications and like the services so if it's not I'd like to keep activity on. 2. Does frontier use CGN (Carrier Grade Nat)? I've been curious about that as well and have heard mixed things. Also just an observation, when I'm playing a game if I change any setting like for instance I enable Anti Aliasing, or even hit my DPI button on my mouse it makes the lag subside for a moment which is one behaviourism I've found to be perplexing. Also the ONT I'm connected to assigns 2 IP's so for instance it's IP might be 108.43.200.1 and it then gives my router an IP of say 108.43.200.13. This is the behaviour you'd expect to see yes?

[Netduma Alex]

On 12/24/2019 at 6:16 AM, iTz Gandhi said:

Every device I own and use I experience "lag" or latency when using said device. A list of those devices includes an Xbox one X, PlayStation 4 Pro, Asus ROG Phone 2, Razer Phone 2, Dell Laptop, and many more I won't arbitrarily list. Suffice it to say it's anything and everything I use. Alongside a very high latency when using any of these devices is a strange phenomenon, where I feel like things on the screen are almost warping and changing size, almost the way say a scaling feature would work. And with that also comes this odd two dimensional quality everything from games to YouTube videos exhibit. To elaborate on that a little more, as a for instance when I am not experiencing the issue (which is very rare) things look amazing in games, be it on my ROG phone 2 playing PUBG Mobile, or on my PlayStation 4 Pro playing Call of Duty. It's like the textures are so alive with depth and detail and the colours appear so much more vibrant, intricate, and present.

These issues don't sound like anything to do with the internet connection to me. These are the kind of issues i'd expect to see if you were streaming the games from a cloud service such as PlayStation Now or Google Stadia. You didn't make it clear if you were streaming your games or not so i'll assume they're local. If you're unsure about whether the internet connection is causing issues, unplug the router and try playing a game (single player obviously) and see if the problems remain.

One suggestion, just from personal experience: Make sure that your TV or monitor is set to Game Mode or something similar. You need to disable all smoothing and post-processing, as these will add loads of input delay and image distortion when gaming. Most modern TV's come with this feature enabled by default so it's worth looking out for!

On 1/1/2020 at 7:43 AM, iTz Gandhi said:

Few questions in an attempt to figure out what's going on. 1. Can Google account/activity settings have any impact on the performance of a device or any of this? Suspicious of that maybe being a factor. Though I don't care about privacy implications and like the services so if it's not I'd like to keep activity on.

The only way that I could see this being an issue was if you were streaming your games from Stadia. Google doesn't have anything to do with facilitating your connection to the internet, unless you're using Google Fiber I guess.

On 1/1/2020 at 7:43 AM, iTz Gandhi said:

2. Does frontier use CGN (Carrier Grade Nat)? I've been curious about that as well and have heard mixed things. Also just an observation, when I'm playing a game if I change any setting like for instance I enable Anti Aliasing, or even hit my DPI button on my mouse it makes the lag subside for a moment which is one behaviourism I've found to be perplexing. Also the ONT I'm connected to assigns 2 IP's so for instance it's IP might be 108.43.200.1 and it then gives my router an IP of say 108.43.200.13. This is the behaviour you'd expect to see yes?

I can see no evidence online that Frontier uses CGN but there doesn't appear to be too many people discussing it. Your IP addresses look normal to me.

[iTz Gandhi]

This is why I hesitated to start a thread on here. I've learned about advanced protocols ranging from OSPF, BGP, RIP-1, RIP-2b, RIP-2M, IGMP, IGMP-Proxying, IGMP-Snooping, ICMP,This is why I hesitated to start a thread on here. I've learned about advanced protocols ranging from OSPF, BGP, RIP-1, RIP-2b, RIP-2M, IGMP, IGMP-Proxying, IGMP-Snooping, ICMP, EIGRP, EGP, IS-IS, And on and on. The reason why is because I want to understand fundamentally how technology words on a rudimentary level. I figured I made it clear I wasn't an amateur muggle but apparently not. You basically read (Or maybe not?) My entire post, and asked if I knew about video processing latency added by useless effects on televisions and subpar monitors. My God, I go on in detail in my original post about this issue being across all devices I own. I came here trying with the intention of articulating my issue with enough clarity and detail thinking maybe someone will would see this post and think "oh yeah! I've seen this before, here's where you are going wrong." Instead you ask if I'm aware of something as trivial as video processing latency. If you fail to understand why I feel as though my intellect and intelligence have been insulted, then truly I am bewildered. If anyone has any helpful information or suggestions they would like to put forward by all means. Also I thank you Fraser, for at least initially starting this thread down a helpful path. 

[Netduma Fraser]

A few things since I've re-read the topic:

When you see this issue on a console what ping are you getting shown by the Geo-Filter?
Can't believe I didn't mention this before but are you using QoS at all? How many devices are online at once when the issue occurs?
Have you tried to connect directly to the ONT to see if the issue is still present?
Actually I wouldn't expect the ONT to be doing that, does the ONT have an interface that you can connect to?

[Mikzxr]

One of the best tools I have used to check my network while playing games is the network info on Battlefield 5. There is an option in the main menu to turn it on. It gives packet loss in and out, latency, latency variation and a bunch of other stuff while you are playing ( it is at the bottom of the screen). It shows my network is perfect at the moment with my variation in ping averaging 1 ms.