Kitz Forum

Broadband Related => Broadband Technology => Topic started by: snadge on February 06, 2019, 06:30:02 PM

Title: The TBB Broadband Quality Monitor (BQM) .. is it reliable?
Post by: snadge on February 06, 2019, 06:30:02 PM

I recall being curious about this years ago...but never finding an answer,

ThinkBroadband's BQM - is it reliable? I ask because when I used it some years ago there would be zero packet loss, but as soon as I put the modem under any stress/use, BQM would start registering 'some' packet loss as the modem wouldn't reply if it were very busy...


Thanks in advance

Title: Re: The TBB Broadband Quality Monitor (BQM) .. is it reliable?
Post by: j0hn on February 06, 2019, 06:34:51 PM

I find it extremely reliable.

Some modems will deliberately drop ICMP pings when under heavy load, which would show as packet loss on a BQM.

It's not something I've ever had with my Asus.

Title: Re: The TBB Broadband Quality Monitor (BQM) .. is it reliable?
Post by: Alex Atkin UK on February 28, 2019, 05:54:43 PM

I'd also suspect that bufferbloat once under load will cause the BQM to timeout, thus reporting it as packet loss.

Its definitely more pessimistic than real-world usage as I see packet loss spikes on BQM when nothing is reported at my end.  I even have ICMP prioritised on my router but still the spikes remain.

You can see the differences today where I had a lot of VPN traffic:
(https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality/share/thumb/616a6ceda948a94f25627c6bf7fbb06850bb0364-28-02-2019.png) (https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality/share/616a6ceda948a94f25627c6bf7fbb06850bb0364-28-02-2019)