Jeremy Visser

This month, we’ve been experiencing latency, packet loss, and speed issues on our Internet connection. Some of the issues have been around in a small way since the beginning of the year, but have been really accentuated this month.

We’ve had 1.5 mbit broadband since our village was first ADSL–enabled in 2005 (first with iiNet, then with Internode since December 2008). While 1.5 mbit is great by 2005 standards, by 2010 standards and living in a family of 6, even watching a YouTube video without stuttering (not to mention gaming or using VoIP at the same time) is barely possible.

A couple of times this year, I noticed that while attempting to play Nexuiz online, despite there being nothing other than gaming traffic on our pipe, my ping time skyrocketed from its usual 50-60 mark up to a minimum of 300, which made the game unplayable. Using ssh to connect to a remote box, I also noticed considerably poor responsiveness when typing. In February of this year, I reported the issue to Internode, who dismissed the issue by saying our exchange had no reported congestion issues.

The issues were generally quite bearable, only being infrequent.

At the beginning of this month, Dad bumped our broadband plan from Internode Easy Broadband to “ADSL Fast”. Living in Yerrinbool, our only option is Telstra Wholesale ADSL1, and are classified as Zone 2 (Regional) which is considerably poorer value than being in a Zone 1 (Metro) area or having DSLAMs from other ISPs available, but it’s the only option we have.

Since getting a theoretically 8 mbit service, we have very rarely reached the maximum speed. During most of the day and evening, the speeds waver from anywhere between 0.5 mbit and 5 mbit. Note that this is not a line noise issue. Our signal-to-noise ratio and line attenuation values (latter is 11 dB) are consistently almost perfect, and our sync speed is always right on 8192 kbps.

Not only that, but our latency has been terrible. It would be bearable if we had to live with slow speeds only, but our ping times skyrocket, which makes responsiveness far worse (e.g. ssh), and gaming is just about impossible.

I called up Internode and provided them with several graphs much like the following:

That demonstrates the latency problems by graphing the ping times to resolv.internode.on.net with my laptop being the only machine connected to the Internet — it was even directly connected to our PPPoE modem, bypassing our router.

To ensure that the above was a “clean room” test without interference from any traffic, I even ran something like the following to make sure of that:

# iptables -I OUTPUT -p ! icmp -j DROP
# iptables -I INPUT  -p ! icmp -j DROP

So by doing all of the above, I have eliminated variables from my own network. The conclusion is simple: the latency is being caused on the other end of the line. Only Internode and Telstra have the power to fix it.

Unfortunately, as I was told by an Internode support rep, Telstra won’t fix latency issues — only packet loss issues, which is a bit of a raw deal. That said, we are getting some packet loss:

--- 192.231.203.132 ping statistics ---
14400 packets transmitted, 14141 received, 1% packet loss, time 2912556ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 39.659/245.465/539.602/168.439 ms, pipe 3

So there are two problems: slow speeds, and terrible latency. I think both are a direct result of congestion, but as I’m not Telstra and Internode aren’t being completely cooperative, I can’t say for sure.

It’s been months now, and it’s getting worse, not better. Sigh.