I’ve got some more information about the low bandwidth message I’ve been seeing. Over the last few weeks, Fortnite starting showing constant low percentage packet loss with intermittent spiking packet loss. Usually had a steady 2% loss, but would spike as high as 20%. The good thing about Fortnite is that you can see where you are having the packet loss…on the download or upload side. It was only the upload side. Download never showed a problem. Speedtest.net showed my speeds as ~120Mbps on the down and anywhere from 2.5-11Mbps on the upload. I’m supposed to be 100/10, however the upload was never consistent.
As a gamer, if you have packet loss connection issues, you will know it before anyone in your house as checking email, web surfing, and watching video will generally never show issues with packet loss. Most, if not all, online gaming uses UDP which is a fire and forget protocol. There is no error correction or packet re-transmissions like with TCP. With UDP, if you lose packets, they are gone…thus so is your positioning/others positioning to and from the gaming server. That’s what causes the skipping and warping in online gaming.
There are two tools I used to to give Spectrum a direction on the problem. Ping Plotter and Wireshark. Using Wireshark, I was able to get the IP address of one of the Fortnite east servers(just run it while in game). From there I used Ping Plotter to trace the hops on the way to the server. It showed ping spikes all over the place starting from the 2nd hop all the way on. What this means is that the problem was on Spectrum’s side. All of the hops with Spectrum and RR(Roadrunner) are hops that my ISP owns…so they can look into the packet loss issues. If you show packet loss beyond your ISP’s hops(switches/routers), then they can’t do anything about those.
Here is what my connection looked like before…the 100% packet loss hops are not answering to trace routes. Pay them no mind.
http://www.ace1252.com/images/Packet_Loss/Packet_Loss_001.png
Spectrum came out(level 2 tech), verified the signal levels and lines to/in the house. As I own my modem(SB6183), I did purchase a replacement just to make sure the modem was not the source of the issue. It was not. Once that was done, they sent out a level 4 tech who verified the packet loss and asked me a curious question…was AT&T fiber in my neighborhood? They are…have been about a year or so…relatively new to the neighborhood. He suspected that the upload issue was where a former customer switched to AT&T fiber, but somewhere along the line, the Spectrum connection was not disconnected. That will back feed into their network causing issues.
Hehe, he also said I was the only one who had contacted them about the issue. =)
He looked over the signals again and let me know that a line maintenance team would be the next step. The next morning I got an automated call saying that the problem had been resolved. I did some testing and this is the result…
http://www.ace1252.com/images/Packet_Loss/Packet_Loss_Fixed_001.png
So they did manage to find whatever was causing the problem as there are no more red vertical lines of packet loss showing on the hops out of their network. My uploads speeds have stabilized at 11Mbps as well.
I appreciate the good work they did to fix the problem. I’ve been with them for 13 years and this is the first major problem I’ve had with their internet service.
I’ll play some more Forza 7 tonight and see if I see the bandwidth warning has disappeared. I’ve played a few hours of Fortnite and it is showing no packet loss on the upload side now.
As a side note, the 3rd hop still shows intermittent ping spiking, however, I have not noticed any spiking of my ping in Fortnite. It’s been rock solid @ ~25mS.
I hope this information helps with those who may need to give more details to their ISP when having issues. You will need to go up the troubleshooting chain on the phone as many first or second level support layers may not know what you are talking about. Some do, but in my experience, most don’t. It helps to have tech degree as you can speak the language(I’m an electrical engineer), so be aware you may need to do you homework and have some pictures on a website that you can show them to back up what you are seeing. For former TWC, now Specturm customers, ask for level 3 tech support which is their Networking/Phone side.
