Assistance Regarding My Mother's DSL Internet Connection

TheCanadianToast · August 7, 2019

Alright so, the problem is, is that, everytime someone starts an upload process on my mother's DSL Internet connection provided to us by Comwave, which is an ISP in Canada. During someone doing an upload on the DSL internet connection, the entire internet connection just completely cuts off for everyone/or becomes really really slow for everyone, and some loading problems start while loading websites like images for example, this happens on every single device until the upload process is stopped or completed. This becomes highly annoying to me when you know, someone in the house comes up to me every single dang time complaining about why the internet connection is not working, or is really really slow. We have been having this unresolved scratching my head problem since April 2016, when we signed up for this DSL internet connection, and my mother's house still has this internet connection due to a 3 year term from 2016 to 2019. Comwave does not even list their Internet 15 plan anymore on their website, and replaced it with all Cable Internet plans. So I guess, Internet 15 is now considered to be a grandfathered plan? I am not entirely sure on that though...

Details:
Internet Plan name: Internet 15
Speeds: 15mbps Download Speed, 1mbps upload speed
Data: Unlimited

I looked it up on Google to see what was causing the above problem, and I came back with the terms Bufferbloat and QoS.

Bufferbloat causes the ping on the internet connection to skyrocket to like 1000ms+ everytime when someone is uploading, causing major lag/being kicked out from the match entirely from online gaming and causing major lag for Voice Over IP applications like Discord for example due to the high ping.

For the term QoS, meaning Quality of Service, looking it up on Google told me that people should find this feature on their router's control panel, and QoS feature should be helpful with this problem. However I went into the router's control panel, and I do not see a feature like that in the Comwave provided router at all, all I see is an option for Port Forwarding, thats it. Which is a total bummer.

The provided DSL Gateway router from Comwave, is the SmartRG SR360N, and it looks like Comwave themselves has flashed the firmware with their own firmware, as going to the router IP address redirects me to their Control Panel for the router, located directly on their website (comwave.net), instead of going directly in the Routers IP address showing in the address bar, which is kinda interesting to me honestly. As seen here:

I even attempted to contact the official Comwave Twitter account directly on Twitter about this problem that I am having myself, and the constant responses back from them are that they keep on begging me to give them my phone number, so that they can schedule a callback to me to try and to attempt to help me solve this problem, but I have been reluctant to do so since the DSL Internet Connection is under my mother's account by Comwave, and not to me. My mother even refuses to call Comwave's customer support directly themselves on the phone for whatever reason, probably because she does not want to deal with it, even though she is the customer, and not me. Comwave even attempted to offer me help from a Senior Technician, but I never accepted that offer, at least not yet.:

I don't know what else to do at this point, if I should proceed with giving Comwave my phone number anyways for them to schedule a callback to me and not to my mom to attempt to try and to fix this problem themselves with their technical support.

Thank you for taking the time to read all the adventures I have to deal with regarding Comwave. An ISP in Canada.

Any replies back here on any advice that I should do would be greatly appreciated.

Fasauceome · August 7, 2019

2 minutes ago, TheCanadianToast said:

if I should proceed with giving Comwave my phone number anyways for them to schedule a callback to me and not to my mom to attempt to try and to fix this problem themselves with their technical support.

If I were in your place that's what I'd do, I would basically require live contact for either in depth troubleshooting or scheduling a maintenance worker to rectify it. Trust me, I recently hashed out an internet problem and proxy solutions with email and whatnot just doesn't work when you don't have a great idea of what's going on with your network.

Donut417 · August 7, 2019

Seen this before on my Comcast connection back in the day. If you saturate your upstream like that it can take out the whole connection. At least that was my experience on Comcast back when I used to Torrent. The only fix I found was to limit the uploads in my torrent software.

schizznick · August 7, 2019

The internet by nature is bi-directional, however it is asynchronous in it's bandwidth. When you saturate the upload you prevent other clients or software from being able to send/request information upstream. Even though you have bandwidth available to receive the requested packets/information you don't have enough to request said information. This is worse with TCP traffic as it requires a confirmation of every packet, UDP may or may not be affected depending as it is mostly a one way protocol. Streaming media is mostly UDP traffic so a streaming show may not be affected by saturating your upload until you stop a show or change to a new one as the control traffic is TCP. Loading a webpage or gaming however does require a large amount of back and forth communications which would be affected. Utilizing QOS can help in situations like this but really the best answer is more bandwidth. DSL has a few options such as Annex M or bonding that can give you more upload if supported by your ISP.

Alex Atkin UK · August 8, 2019

15 hours ago, schizznick said:

The internet by nature is bi-directional, however it is asynchronous in it's bandwidth. When you saturate the upload you prevent other clients or software from being able to send/request information upstream. Even though you have bandwidth available to receive the requested packets/information you don't have enough to request said information. This is worse with TCP traffic as it requires a confirmation of every packet, UDP may or may not be affected depending as it is mostly a one way protocol. Streaming media is mostly UDP traffic so a streaming show may not be affected by saturating your upload until you stop a show or change to a new one as the control traffic is TCP. Loading a webpage or gaming however does require a large amount of back and forth communications which would be affected. Utilizing QOS can help in situations like this but really the best answer is more bandwidth. DSL has a few options such as Annex M or bonding that can give you more upload if supported by your ISP.

Streaming is usually TCP because it allows buffering and I'd imagine is needed to also make the switching between different bitrates seamlessly to work. UDP is used when you want a real-time stream, where a gap in streaming is better than losing sync.

There's also the issue that web browsers don't support the UDP streaming protocols.

QoS can actually work really really well, but it depends on the implementation in the router and if the router is really powerful enough to handle it.