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xymox1
Premium Member
join:2008-05-20
Phoenix, AZ
ARRIS SB8200
MikroTik CCR1036-8G-2S+

1 edit

xymox1

Premium Member

Re: Cox speed upgrade degraded my service

Could be connection issues with packet loss that high. ALso could be you switched from a DOCSIS 2 modem doing 1X1 to a DOCSIS 3 doing 6X3 and when you did this you exposed issues at other frequencies on your line that has caused your issues, but,, go get multiping »www.nessoft.com/multiping/ its free. Figure out your gateway.. Start>Type CMD in the box at the bottom and press enter>Type tracert google.com into the black box that comes up..

Let that go

Usually the 3rd one down is your gateway ( if you have a router )

OR ( better ) you can go to your router and see what the gateway is on your WAN side.

Once you have this IP address...

Enter this on multiping "Enter new target"

TYPE in 1 sec into the ping interval box at the top. Let it run.

Remember that if you saturate your connection by say doing speedtest.net or downloading its sure to cause multiping to show a higher latency - this is not a issue, its normal. Packetloss is NOT normal..

Just for reference... The changeover to the new speeds and my latency issues occurred very precisely at midnight on 1/31/13 into 2/1/13..

Remember Phoenix is -7 from UTC so 7pm below is really midnight.

It looks like they did something 30 mins prior to midnite that caused a few small glitches in latency, then a complete loss of connection twice right around midnite, then a hour later something happened and latency and packet loss went crazy and then settled in.



[img]
xymox1

xymox1

Premium Member

Which bring us to here...

This shows the issues. It also shows the general trend im concerned about in rising latency. It shows a clear degradation in the quality of my service.

The latency swings, at peak internet usage times, show a loading/overloading of something. I would love to hear from Cox that they are aware of the issue and are working to correct it. That would be awesome.

This is 60 days in width.

m33crob
join:2013-02-06
Phoenix, AZ

m33crob to xymox1

Member

to xymox1
I guess I'll just schedule a tech to come out something (eventually, not in a real hurry.) I was using a DPC3000 before I swapped to the SB6141 because the old modem only had a 100mbps wan interface and 4x4 bonding. After the modem swap I am bonding on more channels, but they are all in range. Off-hand I think my power levels on all 8 downstream channels is between -5 & -7 and my SNR is around 36 and TX at 42.

xymox1
Premium Member
join:2008-05-20
Phoenix, AZ

xymox1

Premium Member

Hmmm... Thats looks pretty perfect...

Give multiping a while. Let it run for a few days..

If you have swings like i show above, then yea, maybe you are also seeing the issue im describing..
xymox1

xymox1

Premium Member

This appears to effect everyone on all tiers of service.

So even if you dont have higher speeds your lantency and jitter most likely went up, EVEN THO you did not get any added benifit of higher speeds as lower tiers of service are capped,

That would suck even worse. At least I got higher speeds, so some benefit from the change.
xymox1

xymox1

Premium Member

Whoa....

I had not looked at short windows in a while..

Multiping averages out when you look at larger time frames.

Looking at short time frames now makes it clear why my gaming friends are upset. 50ms latency to the gateway. LOTS of jitter. Even some real live packet loss.

This is a whole lot worse then I thought..

30 min window width.



I have now started 0.2s ping intervals to examine this issue more closely.. I want to look at short term latency and jitter..
xymox1

xymox1

Premium Member

OMFG...

Wow the problem is WAY WORSE then i thought..

Here is a before upgrade and after upgrade 30 min multiping with 1 sec ping interval..

The difference is 3 to 5 TIMES worse.

Randomly, second by second, latency is varying from 8ms to 50+ms.. This is a LOT to be happening just to the gateway. For a FPS gamer this is bad news. Clearly for gaming the cox "upgrade" was 100% a downgrade.

lilstone87
join:2009-04-09
Chesapeake, VA

lilstone87

Member

So what exactly are you pinging? ur modem?

xymox1
Premium Member
join:2008-05-20
Phoenix, AZ
ARRIS SB8200
MikroTik CCR1036-8G-2S+

xymox1

Premium Member

No the Cox gateway...

See previous posts...

Use tracert to determine what your gateway is. Or look at your modem WAN status and it will have the gateway..

Its the first step outward past your router and modem.

Well there is also the CMTS. I have pinged the CMTS in the past, but the Gateway makes more sense..
xymox1

1 edit

xymox1

Premium Member

I suppose I should go over my setup...

DPC3010 modem
6X3 bonding
firmware dpc3010-v302r12901-110516a-COX.bin
Levels
RX
Channel 1: 4.3 dBmV 39.9 dB
Channel 2: 4.0 dBmV 39.6 dB
Channel 3: 3.8 dBmV 39.0 dB
Channel 4: 4.2 dBmV 38.8 dB
Channel 5: 4.5 dBmV 38.6 dB
Channel 6: 3.8 dBmV 37.5 dB
TX
Channel 1: 38.5 dBmV
Channel 2: 38.5 dBmV
Channel 3: 38.5 dBmV

I have a direct, new, coax run to the cox pedestal. I dont have cable TV and no splitters. The wire goes from the cox box directly into my modem.

I am currently using a Ubiquity Edge Router Lite
»www.ubnt.com/edgemax#Edg ··· hardware
but have also used a high performance PC running dual NIC's and Vyatta as a high performance router. »www.vyatta.com/product/v ··· os/specs

I am wired with shielded cat 6E

The computer doing the pinging has a high performance NIC and is running a ASUS Rampage 3 extreme MB, Intel i7 X990 @ 3.5Ghz, high performance ram and other things like a RAID 0 set of SSD's.

The computer running multiping does nothing else. It does not even have a monitor. I use remote desktop to access it.

When i first noticed this issue, I changed modem, changed routers and used a different computer and the same latency swings were still present.
lilstone87
join:2009-04-09
Chesapeake, VA

lilstone87

Member

Well I just pinged mine for like 10-15 minutes, avg was 8ms but did have a high of 17ms.

xymox1
Premium Member
join:2008-05-20
Phoenix, AZ
ARRIS SB8200
MikroTik CCR1036-8G-2S+

xymox1

Premium Member

Do you know if your area got upgraded to the highest tier being 100Mb/s + recently ?

Your ping sounds fairly normal, the trick is to monitor over a few days and see what you get..

Plus this could be many things for various people. I am very aware of my connection quality and have good charts over years so I know what my connection looks like performance wise. Keep in mind you could just be seeing normal issues for your area. Im focusing on the "upgrade" and its effects.
lilstone87
join:2009-04-09
Chesapeake, VA

lilstone87

Member

I have had 100/20 speeds since start of november.

xymox1
Premium Member
join:2008-05-20
Phoenix, AZ

xymox1

Premium Member

Interesting... It would be interesting to see your charts and see if you also see this latency swing daily.

However im sure each region will have different loading of gear, so maybe some areas are better/worse then others..

chrisf8657
join:2002-01-27
Glendale, AZ

chrisf8657 to xymox1

Member

to xymox1
I'd point out that the TX (Upstream) power is lower than normal on your modem. Yours is 38.5 and it should be 40+. Mine are at 41-43db.

From FAQ:
DOCSIS 3.0 modems:

Upstream (Transmit): 40-52 dBmV. A value within the range +40 to +52 dBmV is within spec with the low to mid 40's the most common. If the cable modem is going offline, and the upstream signal strength is at or above +52dBmV, then a poor upstream path is probably the problem.

Just thought I'd point that out. Techs will have to tell you if it is acceptable or not, but going by the FAQ I would conclude it's not.

xymox1
Premium Member
join:2008-05-20
Phoenix, AZ
ARRIS SB8200
MikroTik CCR1036-8G-2S+

xymox1

Premium Member

chrisf8657,

The low TX power is because i have nothing between me and pedestal. If I put a 2 way splitter, as most people would have, that puts me in range.

A low TX power simply indicates that I have a good connection to the CMTS and a low power is what is required to happily talk to the CMTS.. There is a handshake between the CMTS and the modem where the best TX power is determined. The CMTS listens to the singal from the modem and watches lots of things including what level my signal is at the CMTS. The CMTS handshake adjusts the level of the cable modem so that it falls inline with where the CMTS needs it to be. In my case the CMTS could hear my modem loud and clear and so set the level lower in order to not be any louder then others..

Generally the lower your TX level is the better your upstream connection is to the CMTS. Generally. Flap ( changes in level ) and things like BER and a host of other things all effect things of course. Butr generally the lower the TX level is the better.

This has not changed in 2 years, so this cant be a issue in my discussion of this change tho. As i mentioned before my levels did not change at all.
xymox1

xymox1

Premium Member

This has a lot of highly technical info on how a CMTS works and how it interacts with a cable modem.. »www.cisco.com/en/US/tech ··· ome.html

chrisf8657
join:2002-01-27
Glendale, AZ

chrisf8657 to xymox1

Member

to xymox1
Just thought I'd point it out.
I don't claim to be a tech of cable modem systems per-se, just go by what I read. Computers and networking are my forte.

xymox1
Premium Member
join:2008-05-20
Phoenix, AZ
ARRIS SB8200
MikroTik CCR1036-8G-2S+

xymox1

Premium Member

Yes cable modems are very analog devices. Just so happens I have a degree in electronics and analog is my fav.. Plus over the years actually learning cable modem systems has become important and good to know..

For you this would not be hard to learn. However it is Cisco annoying. I dont think Cisco can make something easy to use. I think thats just simply impossible for them..
xymox1

xymox1

Premium Member

Hello Cox...

I am hoping your going to tell me that what i am seeing is temp. Some roll out issue maybe, Or something..

I would hate to think that as you are rolling out these upgrades in city after city that no one really considered latency and jitter and only looked at speed. Gaming is a big deal now and gamers account for a reasonable percentage of internet use today. Making changes that degrades gaming performance is really a bad thing to do.

Ive been VERY happy with my service over the years. In fact I could not be happier. Not only the performance, but the speed of technology roll outs and your customer service has been great. I have *ZERO* complaints and nothing but praise. However, this issue has changed all that...

I would like a response. I can also of course provide my MAC if you want to specifically look at my connection.

odog
Minister of internet doohickies
Premium Member
join:2001-08-05
Atlanta, GA
Nokia BGW320-505

odog to xymox1

Premium Member

to xymox1
Feel free to send your modem MAC. I will however warn you in advance that you're not doing very scientific tests. You're testing latency to the gateway.... over a connection you're using.

Also increasing the speed of a connection doesn't change the CMTS configuration. Those are just bits in the cm config file telling it to be 150,000,000 instead of 50,000,000.

Do you understand how unbelievably catastrophic 50ms gateway latency would be? We would have dogs and cats living together, and mass hysteria. Every gamer in the entire PHX metro area would be camping outside our offices.

I'd also suggest thumbnailing the images, otherwise it makes this thread hard to read.

I'm not sure if this has been suggested but bring it back to the most simple config possible. Try connecting one computer directly to the modem, and don't use the connection AT ALL. I can also setup concurrent pings to both your modem and CPE and watch them for an hour.
nickphx
join:2009-10-29
Phoenix, AZ

nickphx to xymox1

Member

to xymox1
Again, no proof. Just rants.

You're expecting commercial service level agreements on a consumer level service.
You're nuts.
You're ranting about 2ms in gain.
You're choosing to say it's 15-20% increase in an attempt to make it appear worse than it is.

You're using ICMP to test.
This is not a reliable method to test or troubleshoot. It has already been stated countless times by COX people on this forum that ICMP is de-prioritized on their gateways/routers/equipment.

You're testing from a connection you're actively using. I wonder if that impacts testing?

You're not really showing any real problems, just ranting using an unreliable source of data for the reasons behind your rant.

Yes, I'm sure it's all a guise for COX to install content and protocol filters. They're also watching you pee. This is why I've lined my computer room with tin foil and chicken wire and maintain an AES256 encrypted vpn connection with multiple servers. They'll never be able to see which kitten videos my wife chose to watch today!

bbeesley
join:2003-08-07
Richardson, TX

bbeesley to odog

Member

to odog
said by odog:

I will however warn you in advance that you're not doing very scientific tests. You're testing latency to the gateway.... over a connection you're using.

What odog is telling you is spot on here. You can't reliably test for latency and jitter as granular you are trying to do with the software you are using because the client PC running the software could be introducing errors in the report due to CPU load and you have no idea if the devices in the path are priority responding to ICMP.

If you want to test this reliably, you would need to get a test set or a NID and test point on either end of the connection that could do RFC2544 or Y.1731 performance reporting.

xymox1
Premium Member
join:2008-05-20
Phoenix, AZ
ARRIS SB8200
MikroTik CCR1036-8G-2S+

2 edits

xymox1

Premium Member

ODog, Sorry for the wide charts. I use a HD resolution so I did not notice the wide images causing the text to be unreadable. I kinda figured most people had close to HD resolutions these days, but I would imagine most computers at work would be lower rez, sorry.
quote:
Also increasing the speed of a connection doesn't change the CMTS configuration.
Of course. But changing the speeds I think also brought with it a change in gear. Somewhere between me and my gateway something changed.

Im going to address all the comments above, so these are not directed at you Odog

Just a reminder I have been running this same setup with Multiping for 5 YEARS with the same latency charts. 5 YEARS. With once per second pings to the gateway with basically zero jitter and extremely consistent latency. FOR YEARS.

Suddenly, and the moment they switched over to the new speeds ( and changed some topology elements or gear or something ), I noticed my my browsing had odd, but short pauses. I didnt even look at my multiping for like a week. I initially also did not notice the increased speeds. I have a wireline speed router and high performance network and a very fast computer so even small changes in the connection are visible. I did not notice the speed increase at first. What I noticed was the odd small hangs and it just seemed slower. It was like each element of a web page load was now landing kinda at a more stuttery pace. It was no longer a clean even load. The VERY FIRST THING I DID was plug my main computer directly into the modem. Browsed some web pages and seemed to notice the same thing. It was odd.

That was the moment I ran speed test and noticed the speed increase. I also went over and looked at my multiping. The charts confuzed me as I had better speeds, but worse latency and it jittered and had swings. They looked just like when a section of the cable modem system has too many modems and during peaks it gets overloaded and latency and latency spikes go up.

As I mentioned before, multiping runs on its own computer. Its a stripped down XP with lots of services stopped there is literally nothing else running on the machine and all non essential service are stopped. It runs with 34 processes running and before starting Multiping it sits at 97MB of ram used. Its a extremely lean OS setup. Then the hardware is fairly extreme. ASUS Rampage III Xtreme MB, high performance ram, Adaptec RAID 0 SSD's, high performance NIC..

The performance of Multiping is fairly unaffected by the machine normally even on a reasonable loaded machine. I suggest you read up on the software as thats a important aspect of their design.

So running it on a high performance machine, that does nothing else, that does not even have a monitor or keyboard and just sits in a rack doing nothing is a fairly clean way to do this.

Yes I did plug it directly into the modem for a day and saw exactly the same latency spikes and swings.

I have charts of it pinging my router. It shows sub millisecond ping times and zero jitter. I have charts showing it pinging my modem thru the router, again less then a ms and zero jitter. Although you can see the router work as you can see ever so slight changes ( sub millisecond ) when the router gets loaded with traffic.

I have baseline charts showing my network up to my cable modem having extremely low latency and jitter as my baseline.
quote:
Do you understand how unbelievably catastrophic 50ms gateway latency would be?
Yes. Ive seen it.

If you look at my 30 min latency chart, you will see the base latency is 8-10ms. But there are these spiky short ( almost single packet ) jumps to 50. Kinda bursty. They are fairly rare like randomly a few every 30 mins and are related to peak internet usage times, with 20 and 30ms being more common. So the reason you dont have people going crazy is its a high jittery kinda thing, so its hard to spot at first.

In my case I saw it as periodic slight hangs in web page elements loading. Friends of mine who are gamers experienced it as very brief lag that came in short bursts at key times of the day that they had not experienced before 2/1/13

My experience and theirs matched what my charts showed.
quote:
I will however warn you in advance that you're not doing very scientific tests.
Well its way better then prob 99.99% of everyone else using Cox and I think its a reasonable way to look at things. It does have limitations, but in this case I think it has caught a real issue.

nickphx,, you obviously missed the chart that shows a jittery increase up to 50ms in spiky bursts. Im not talking about 2ms, im talking about 50ms. My 15-20% comment was as a overall average its actually 3-5 TIMES worse in spiky peaks. But your trolling so im gonna just ignore your whining and rants.

Bbeesley,
quote:
What odog is telling you is spot on here. You can't reliably test for latency and jitter as granular you are trying to do with the software you are using because the client PC running the software could be introducing errors in the report due to CPU load and you have no idea if the devices in the path are priority responding to ICMP.
completely valid cautions. How the gateway responds to ICMP is indeed important. I have charts of this going back 5 years and its been exactly the same and very very consistent. Also I noticed the 50ms random spikes in real use on port 80 web page browsing long before i even looked at the charting. The charting just confirmed, at least for me, what I was seeing.
quote:
If you want to test this reliably, you would need to get a test set or a NID and test point on either end of the connection that could do RFC2544 or Y.1731 performance reporting.
I agree completely. But im not going to go spend money to do that. I might be able to accomplish this in Linux and I have some tools on my Mikrotik router. However I would need the same thing on the other end of course.

I would think that Cox can do this. Maybe just pinging off my modem. It would have to be high rez and frequent. a single ping a min is not going to catch this.

I would love for it to be a easy to address problem. But I dont think it is.

odog, I will send you my info. Im sorry to cause issues, but im a tad upset that a speed increase i was looking forward to has been a let down for me. I do love the new speeds, I just hope that maybe the issue im bringing up can get settled down..
xymox1

1 edit

xymox1

Premium Member

I think im also seeing some actual packet loss during peak internet times.

Ive started a DSLreports Smokeping. Its pinging from california so its got a higher latency and the jittery swings might not be that visible, but packet loss would be.

»/r3/sm ··· 05fe.CA1
xymox1

xymox1

Premium Member

I do like the Y.156sam performance testing, in particular the Service performance test. Does Cox use this ? Is this published someplace for Cox ?

»en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y.156sam

"Packet delay variation is a key performance indicator (KPI) for real time services such as VoIP and Internet protocol television (IPTV) and is not measured by the RFC 2544"

So if Cox is just focused on using RFC 2544 they might not be quite as aware of the issues I am seeing. However they must do some testing of this..
xymox1

xymox1

Premium Member

»www.youtube.com/watch?v= ··· XyzGl5oM
xymox1

xymox1

Premium Member

The obvious question is what are the SLA acceptable levels for Cox ? I doubt these are published. Where is pass/fail for each service ?

It would be awesome to be able to run EtherSAM on my connection for 24hrs doing a service level test.

ikyuaoki
join:2011-04-12
Wichita, KS

ikyuaoki

Member

Cox does not provide any SLA for residential services unless I'd direct point you to the cox business class services there, If you need the SLA.

chrisf8657
join:2002-01-27
Glendale, AZ

chrisf8657

Member

Exactly. Almost all residential services under the USA are best-effort and not guaranteed. I specifically remember a paragraph in the Cox TOS that states no speeds or anything is guaranteed.