[Outages-discussion] [EXTERNAL] Re: Mediacom intermittent packet loss

[Chapman, Brad (NBCUniversal)]

devicetests.com is interesting.  However, the latency / packet loss test is only capable of blasting a max of 450 KB/s (3.6Mbps) even when cranked to its maximum silliness... but his sample shows a steadily increasing ping time over the length of the test.  That's strange.

It could be an oversubscribed line, or the original repair wasn't done right (or has failed again), or he just doesn't have sufficient bandwidth to stream at all.

1. What is his chosen streaming platform?

2. What is the resolution, frame rate, bitrate etc?

3. What is his contracted upload rate from Mediacom ("up to ____ Mbps upload")?

4. Has he run a 24-hour twitch stream to track the latency around the clock?  Maybe there's a pattern.


—Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 19, 2022, at 7:46 PM, Chad Austin <me at chadaustin.org> wrote:

22 seconds of latency?

Do you have gigabytes of buffers, or is something sending pause frames?

+1 to 'did you plug your PC into the modem directly?'

-Chad

On 2/19/2022 9:57 PM, Scott Buettner wrote:
The cable carrier has done the standard "have him powercycle then send a tech out" and the techs have not found a problem in this most recent issue. (He had a similar problem in December that WAS line related and was resolved in early Jan by the carrier techs). Unfortunately he's on residential class service at the moment (which I am trying to persuade him to correct) so the level of support we're getting from the Tier 1 folks isn't ideal.
He's scheduling another tech dispatch with them now, just to be safe.

It's hitting TCP and UDP both, which is just manifesting in "slowness" on TCP of course. It's most relevant over UDP as he is a professional streamer and the most prominent symptom is frame drops on that, and I've confirmed it is affecting his connection in general, the issue is not specific to that service. I had him grab a packet loss test using devicetests.com (which looks to be based on WebRTC for the test) and we managed to grab results of it actively happening here:  https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://dast-files.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/packets.jpg__;!!PIZeeW5wscynRQ!78RScPexz65Gc0_sIwuwdK43Y9sa-rcED6XtN-khol5rNm3Sl80znvDY-x1vXl_u4w$
He's replaced the modem and router both in the last 3 months, along with the cables.
It's very intermittent, bursts of packet loss over a few minutes, then fine for some period of time (minutes to hours).

He's informed me that a colleague of his located about 4 hours away on the same ISP is experiencing similar issues, but that individual is not a client of mine so I don't have anything concrete from that endpoint currently.

I'm happy to keep discussing/troubleshooting, but I would like to avoid spamming the rest of the list (even -discuss), so feel free to email me directly.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com>
Sent: Saturday, February 19, 2022 7:18 PM
To: Scott Buettner <DasterinTempus at outlook.com>
Cc: outages-discussion at outages.org
Subject: Re: [Outages-discussion] Mediacom intermittent packet loss

----- Original Message -----
From: "Scott Buettner" <DasterinTempus at outlook.com>
I hate to ask since this isn't really the forum, but I'm sort of out of ideas:
Would anyone from MediacomCable be able to reach out to me offlist?
I'm not gonna call it an outage, but I have a client on their service
who is having crippling intermittent upload packet loss (~85%) for
most of this month, calls from him to phone support have not resulted
in a resolution and it's seriously affecting his home business.

Thanks in advance if anyone can assist, and sorry to bother everyone otherwise.
--Samantha
The cable carrier has confirmed there's not a low-signal problem on the link, and other first-level stuff like that?  Do they have their own router, have they plugged directly into the cablemodem for test (after a powercycle)?

What protocol isn't working, does other stuff not work too?

You're right, this is usually out-of-scope for Outages, but at least you posted it on -discuss.  :-)

Cheers,
-- jra
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