FTTP BQM

[#1]

Does anyone know why my ping is spiking really high at random even when no one is using the internet?

[#2]

There are two questions there -

1)  Why do ping spikes appear when you think the broadband is idle -

It could be anything on your home wired network and/or WiFi that 'phones home' for an update, perhaps a mobile phone syncing it's cloud storage, or any device doing a anti-virus database refresh or fetching a firmware update, etc.

2) Why is the ping spike so high when it occurs -

The fact that the spike is so high is most likely due to you using a router which hasn't been optimised for bufferbloat, you can check your "Bufferbloat Grade" using this test - https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat .  A router that is tuned properly should keep the maximum latency spikes to within a few tens of milliseconds, which translates to a test result of "A+", "A", or "B".

[#3]

Its funny you mention Buffbloat because I ran a test the other day just to see and the ping spike's are way higher than this result 

https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat?test-id=ca22e58f-e778-4ccc-a9b1-38b40943a3d2

[#4]

The difference is that the TBB-BQM plot shows each vertical line indicating the singular worst ping time out of one hundred successive ping responses,  whereas the bufferbloat result shows the mid way value between the minimum and median increase in latency during the test period.

Therefore the TBB will indicate the worst latency times, whereas the bufferbloat represents the typical delay that traffic on your network would experience if your broadband was running at full bandwidth.

If you have a router that is capable of QoS, SQM, or CAKE, traffic management,  you should be able to tune your "Bufferbloat Grade" from "B" to "A" or "A+", and see a considerable taming of the worst case TBB-BQM ping spikes.

[#5]

I do use QOS and I'm not sure it makes a difference to be honest

[#6 · Accepted solution]

Looking at your bufferbloat test posted previously, the fact that you're getting a "B" suggests that QoS is having some effect - as most people here on 145 / 30 FTTP using a Plusnet Hub2 (that doesn't have QoS) get a result of "C" or "D".

However, the fact your speed test results are showing as 144.2 / 28.2, suggests that your QoS bandwidth limiters are set close to your 145 / 30 product speed - which is too high !.

For QoS to make a difference, you need to reduce the values in the bandwidth limiters somewhere between 5% and 10%.

As an experiment set the limiters to say 135 / 26 and run the bufferbloat test again, you might improve the score to an "A".

[#7]

Moderators Note

This topic has been moved from Broadband to Full Fibre