O Canada! > Canadian > TekSavvy > Packet loss rates up to 2% on TekSavvy DSL

reply to hiremichael

Re: Packet loss rates up to 2% on TekSavvy DSL

>I believe Teksavvy has ICMP packets set to low priority, so when you ping/trace, and the router is busy it will show as timed out.

OK, this would mean to me then that they are, in effect, doing traffic shaping or throttling of certain types of IP traffic (ICMP is an IP protocol). My understanding was that they weren't doing any such thing, treating certain IP packets differently.

>This doesn't mean it is down, if you never get dropped downloads/uploads then your line is fine.

Yes, I agree, nothing is "down". TCP makes up for lost packets and most of us would never notice if 2% of packets are lost, assuming the time distribution is random. Even VOIP should be OK with such packet loss, but 0% is better.

Don't get me wrong, Internet still works OK at 2% loss rate; Even google.com is showing me 1-3% packet loss (on my Videotron cable which has 0% loss for other sites). I'm just trying to figure out if this is normal for TekSavvy or perhaps due to a sometimes, somewhat congested local router.

If ICMP packets truly are being treated differently on TekSavvy network, I'm sure I can find another IP or UDP protocol to do some latency and packet loss testing with.

Try UDP traceroute

reply to TFArchive
>If teksavvy had any issues on their internal network they
>would have fixed it by now or at least told us about it.

Ever since they decided to lower ICMP priority on their routers, it has been quite annoying because traceroute now take much longer to complete since they hang often on the teksavvy routers.

Someone at Teksavvy may have produced some nice Powerpoint presentation to justify crippling ICMP, but in the end, it irritates users. It was much better before when their routers were reliably responding to both UDP and ICMP traceroutes.

I guess when any ISP grows, they eventually hire some guy who produces Powerpoint presentations to justify some quality-lowering decisions.

Putting their routers to respond to ICMP on high priority would be a waste of resources

It's not like downloads and other stuff take longer to complete.

A delayed tracert shouldn't make you lose any sleep.

>Putting their routers to respond to ICMP on high priority would be a waste of resources.

I'd prefer if all packets were treated equally. When ISPs start mucking with the priorities of different packet types, we have the situation many of us hate where P2P or encrypted traffic, or traffic over certain ports or VOIP through a competing VSP is crippled.

If "TekSavvy" is to cater to "tech savvy" customers then they need to ensure that we can test to see where problems may lie. For that, they need to support reliable testing with ICMP.

It's a bit of a different story with the routers, IMO, should they decide that ICMP packets from one of their routers should be lower priority. But, assuming they have proper defenses against DOS attacks, I'd prefer they not cripple router ICMP responses.

In any case, I see no evidence they are treating pings to Internet sites (not their routers) any different than HTTP or VOIP etc. In my limited testing, the packet losses are about equal for different types of traffic.

Currently, from 10:20 to 11:08 PM I'm seeing 2.6-5.7% loss rates to sites that are 0.0% loss on Videotron. My last VOIP call showed about 2-3% loss to vbuzzer.com, which matches the 2.5% rate I see with ping testing.

At 5% loss rate, I'd consider that "trouble zone", esp. for apps like VOIP.

I suspect that my local first two routers are losing 2.5% of the packets, and other routers are responsible for the rest for certain sites. Example, yahoo.com shows 5.3% loss so I think other routers in TekSavvys route to yahoo.com are losing the other 2.8%.

Once again, just to be clear, yahoo.com shows 0.0% loss on Videotron so we can't blame this on "general internet congestion".

--- 69.9.162.69 ping statistics ---
10000 packets transmitted, 10000 received, 0% packet loss, time 147152ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 31.723/34.576/46.279/2.557 ms, pipe 4

This was done from my home connection using DSL to that gaming server. Not a single packet lost. We don't do any QoS or give more priority to forwarded packets more than others.

That said, we are planning on a network upgrade this Tuesday to replace some equipment. Hopefully things will improve.