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[Weaver]

It would be worth doing a speed test using the test download files of various sizes that are available on the thinkbroadband website under speed tests. If you pick one file of a certain size download it and time it then if the resulting speed is way off then we can suspect there are errors, that or congestion or alien traffic from other things going on through your internet connection or too much load on the test server or congestion on the link that goes into it. Should do several tests to see if the resulting numbers are varying, because if they are then it could well be alien traffic variations or congestion or server load variations.

[7cfm]

Well the proper results are in (attached) and they are pretty conclusive, it's the router. I've spent the rest of the afternoon setting up my travel router as the router and converting the Asus to a WAP as the wifi on the travel router isn't brilliant. So I've now got Zyxel VMG1312-B10A (modem) - GL-AR750S  (router) - ASUS RT-AC66U_B1 (WAP).

Thanks to every-one who chipped in with their suggestions, much appreciated

[Weaver]

The 1312-B10A is a pretty superb piece of kit.

[7cfm]

The new router is setup and the packet loss is sorted. In the attached screenshot you can see when the router was running yesterday with nothing connected there was hardly any latency but today once I'd connected my LAN the latency has significantly increased. Should I be concerned about this? If so is there much I can do about it?

[7cfm]

Just a quick update, I disabled 2.4 wifi this morning for an hour just leaving 5 GHz wifi and wired connections still active, the attached chart is very telling, for that hour latency was fine. I guess the next step is to disable the 2.4 GHz wireless devices one by one to see what's causing the issue, unless I'm barking up the wrong tree?

The thin red line at 07:00am is where the line dropped while I was online and I had to manually update the IP address in BQM because I'm back on the Zyxel modem, I had hoped these would stop now my SNR has been raised.

[burakkucat]

Hmm . . . Both puzzling and interesting. 

[7cfm]

Yes very puzzling indeed. Now I've started this thread I'm going to continue to share the results in case it helps some-one else with a similar problem in the future.

Yesterday evening I tried disabling 3 wireless devices at a time to see if I could find what which device is responsible but the results were less than conclusive. I switched off 2.4 GHz wifi overnight again (attached) and the result was that the BQM graph was very healthy. The next step is to leave the wifi on overnight and disable all but 3 devices at a time to try and isolate which one is causing the issue, unless I get lucky it could take a few days to find the culprit and I will update when i have more.

Feel free to let me know if my logic is flawed or you think something else is going on, maybe it's 2 devices 'chatting' that's causing it and it's therefore a certain combination of devices? (I guess you can tell from the way I describe things I'm not technical  )

[jelv]

Possibilities:

Are any of your devices using file sharing (Google drive, Onedrive, Dropbox etc.)?

Do any of your devices have P2P/BitTorrent software installed?

Is there an email client constantly checking for new mail?

[PhilipD]

Hi

What is responding to the pings from the Thinkbroadband site?

Do you have with your ISP any pages that show how much data you are using, this may identify a lot of background usage from a device.  Any devices streaming all the time without your knowledge such as smart speakers left on but the volume turned down rather than streaming stopped?  Things like video players (Chromecast etc) that have wallpapers constantly changing can use quite a bit of data constantly downloading a new wall paper every few seconds (as I found!).  Any security cameras uploading to the cloud?

Don't forget if your network is being used then ping times are often higher, that isn't a problem as they are given a low priority usually.  Your issue isn't ping times, but something constantly using your network, it may just be a combination of every device doing something.  You might be able to add a QoS rule for pings so your router treats them with a high priority so the chart then excludes your own network/router busyness.

Regards

Phil

[7cfm]

Thanks for the suggestions, no bit torrents or file sharing etc on that wireless connection, from memory there is only mobile phones, a youview box, a coupe of chrome sticks an amazon firestick, my dns server (pihole) and an amazon echo dot. The idea of giving pings QoS is an interesting idea and yes it crossed my mind that it might be a combination of devices which could be why taking 3 out at a time was inconclusive.

[PhilipD]

Hi

Things like Amazon firesticks and YouView boxes can be quite chatty.

What is responding to the pings? 

Regards

Phil

[22over7]

You said you've a pihole. I've found its logs (that you can look at via the admin web pages) can give you a hint about the chattiest things on your lan.
Rather appalling really.  (I now keep my amazon firestick and tablet powered off till actual use).

I guess its your ASUS wifi router that responds to pings. I wonder if failure to respond in a timely way to pings, or dropping PPPOE several
times a day might be one symptom exhibited by soon-to-fail elderly router. 

[7cfm]

I've taken to Asus off and replaced it with a gl.inet AR750S as the Asus was also dropping packets, it's the AR750S that's responding to pings now.

[Ronski]

Any chance someone else could be using your wi-fi, perhaps a password change would be a good idea - preferably something random and at least 14 characters long. Also make sure you're using WPA2.

[7cfm]

It's a good suggestion but I'm pretty sure that's not it, I've already got a decent WPA2 key and where I live is very rural which makes it unlikely.

The results from last night are narrowing things down, I got lucky with the 3 clients I disabled, 2 Chromecasts and an amazon firestick, you can see overnight the latency was fine, the high latency in the evening was caused by watching BBC iplayer, I'll investigate further tonight.

I thought it would be a good idea to monitor hourly data usage as well to see what correlation there was with latency and if any of my devices are using silly amounts of data and I'm going to use dslstats to do this. There are two interfaces I can monitor and I'm not sure which I should be looking at, ptm0 shows RX : 3.1 GB / TX : 1.3 GB and ptm0.1 shows RX : 3.4 GB / TX 1.1 GB, I'm using a Zyxel VMG1312-B10A?