Is my Router causing latency issues/bottlenecks?

[John204]

Hello, I have a VR600v, which supports up to 100 mbps. I currently have a 100/20 mbps connection with Matesnbn but am getting latency issues during peak hours. I understand that during this time, there are a lot more people utilising the network but is it possible to verify whether there is a bottleneck caused by the amount of people in my household on latency. They tend to be streaming movies, watching YouTube and playing mobile games. One method i’ve attempted is by changing the router to wired only to see if the latency reduces but it appears to not (not sure if it requires a restart/a bit of time). I’m also not sure whether tracert detects these kinds of bottlenecks.

Thanks!

[Skiiwee29]

Yes, sounds like you're being bottlenecked by your router. 

[Falcon1986]

@John204- If you're still seeing the slowdowns with only wired devices attached, then you can rule out WiFi as a cause.

 

Many devices accessing online content simultaneously (e.g. streaming) will slow down the speed and responsiveness of all clients. You can try activating QoS if that is available on your router to prioritize certain traffic, but if this doesn't help, it might be a sign that your household has outgrown the limits of your current ISP connection.

 

I'm assuming that you have a DSL connection given the V600v. The speed of DSL falls significantly the farther you are from the ISP data centre. So you might have a slowdown on the WAN side even before reaching your LAN.

[Alex Atkin UK]

13 hours ago, John204 said:

Hello, I have a VR600v, which supports up to 100 mbps. I currently have a 100/20 mbps connection with Matesnbn but am getting latency issues during peak hours. I understand that during this time, there are a lot more people utilising the network but is it possible to verify whether there is a bottleneck caused by the amount of people in my household on latency. They tend to be streaming movies, watching YouTube and playing mobile games. One method i’ve attempted is by changing the router to wired only to see if the latency reduces but it appears to not (not sure if it requires a restart/a bit of time). I’m also not sure whether tracert detects these kinds of bottlenecks.

Thanks!

Is it actually 100/20 or "up to" 100/20.  If its DSL, the street cabinet would need to be around 200m away or less and with zero crosstalk from neighbours to get 100Mbit down.

I know this as I used to get that speed but due to crosstalk now I'm down to 67Mbit.

While a few people streaming probably wouldn't bottleneck on 100Mbit, its obvious far more likely if you end up connected significantly slower than that.

Even one person uploading will cause a lot of latency (even cases you might not think about such as video chat) or,. god forbid, if someone were to use BitTorrent that can bring a lot of routers to their knees.

Its kinda hard to tell if the router itself is bottlenecking unless it tells you the CPU usage.

[Darren]

You've ruled out the wireless so probably an issue either a) someone in your household uploading a lot, in which case hopefully the router could show you some sort of live bandwith utilisation or b) a DSL issue. Remember, DSL you share with a whole bunch of other households in your street and is a shared medium.

 

The router seems quite highly spec'd, so I doubt it's that tbh.

[John204]

7 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Is it actually 100/20 or "up to" 100/20.  If its DSL, the street cabinet would need to be around 200m away or less and with zero crosstalk from neighbours to get 100Mbit down.

I know this as I used to get that speed but due to crosstalk now I'm down to 67Mbit.

While a few people streaming probably wouldn't bottleneck on 100Mbit, its obvious far more likely if you end up connected significantly slower than that.

Even one person uploading will cause a lot of latency (even cases you might not think about such as video chat) or,. god forbid, if someone were to use BitTorrent that can bring a lot of routers to their knees.

Its kinda hard to tell if the router itself is bottlenecking unless it tells you the CPU usage.

Yes, like all providers they advertise up to. When I run a speed test (on the 5g network right now as my PC is shut off), I get around 93/17.

[John204]

19 hours ago, Falcon1986 said:

@John204- If you're still seeing the slowdowns with only wired devices attached, then you can rule out WiFi as a cause.

 

Many devices accessing online content simultaneously (e.g. streaming) will slow down the speed and responsiveness of all clients. You can try activating QoS if that is available on your router to prioritize certain traffic, but if this doesn't help, it might be a sign that your household has outgrown the limits of your current ISP connection.

 

I'm assuming that you have a DSL connection given the V600v. The speed of DSL falls significantly the farther you are from the ISP data centre. So you might have a slowdown on the WAN side even before reaching your LAN.

I wanted to attempt the QOS option but for some stupid reason, tp-link decided to ship the Australian routers with the Eu firmware, which they removed QOS. Do you have another other possible solutions? The only thing I can think of is some program like netlimiter for PC’s to limit bandwidth but i’m out of ideas for limiting bandwidth on say something like a console/Android streaming device.

[John204]

4 hours ago, Darren said:

You've ruled out the wireless so probably an issue either a) someone in your household uploading a lot, in which case hopefully the router could show you some sort of live bandwith utilisation or b) a DSL issue. Remember, DSL you share with a whole bunch of other households in your street and is a shared medium.

 

The router seems quite highly spec'd, so I doubt it's that tbh.

Fair, I thought that my router was low endish due to the upper limit of 100mbps. I’ll check on the live upload usage tomorrow, when everyone is on the network. It is plausible that the android streaming box is doing something like torrenting in the background to save the manufactorers server costs, but who knows what happens in the background.

[Alex Atkin UK]

5 hours ago, John204 said:

I wanted to attempt the QOS option but for some stupid reason, tp-link decided to ship the Australian routers with the Eu firmware, which they removed QOS. Do you have another other possible solutions? The only thing I can think of is some program like netlimiter for PC’s to limit bandwidth but i’m out of ideas for limiting bandwidth on say something like a console/Android streaming device.

QoS often makes things worse as it increases the CPU usage considerably.  Its why I moved away from consumer routers to x86.

[Darren]

18 hours ago, John204 said:

Fair, I thought that my router was low endish due to the upper limit of 100mbps. I’ll check on the live upload usage tomorrow, when everyone is on the network. It is plausible that the android streaming box is doing something like torrenting in the background to save the manufactorers server costs, but who knows what happens in the background.

Where do you get the 100Mbps from? Seems to be its VDSL capability which is quite high end actually, that's the maximum throughput of a VDSL connection - do you even have VDSL or do you have FTTH/Fiber??

[John204]

36 minutes ago, Darren said:

Where do you get the 100Mbps from? Seems to be its VDSL capability which is quite high end actually, that's the maximum throughput of a VDSL connection - do you even have VDSL or do you have FTTH/Fiber??

I have a NBN FTTC connection. Used to have Telstra cable, which had speeds around 110/5 without latency issues but was forced to NBN.

[John204]

Went through Tp-Link support today to find out whether there is a CPU monitor for my router and although the consultant seemed to have no clue what he/she was doing and went in a huge tangent rather than answering my question, we stumbled onto the firmware version not being the latest (which surprised me as apparently the auto update function and button does not work. Upon updating, I now have access to a QOS option along with a firmware that may have patched out some issues, so I will need to verify whether this latency issue still occurs. Sounds like i'm writing a diary but oh well.

[John204]

On 1/4/2021 at 7:09 PM, Darren said:

You've ruled out the wireless so probably an issue either a) someone in your household uploading a lot, in which case hopefully the router could show you some sort of live bandwith utilisation or b) a DSL issue. Remember, DSL you share with a whole bunch of other households in your street and is a shared medium.

 

The router seems quite highly spec'd, so I doubt it's that tbh.

Just checked my network utilization and you were correct. The streaming box was utilizing a lot of upload bandwidth. I've set up QOS for the streaming box and my pc but there seems to be high latency and bufferbloat on speedtest.net and dslreport correspondingly. Is this because I've set it up incorrectly? I want to limit the streaming box to a set download and upload bandwidth but doesn't seem to be working.

[Darren]

On 1/8/2021 at 9:26 PM, John204 said:

Just checked my network utilization and you were correct. The streaming box was utilizing a lot of upload bandwidth. I've set up QOS for the streaming box and my pc but there seems to be high latency and bufferbloat on speedtest.net and dslreport correspondingly. Is this because I've set it up incorrectly? I want to limit the streaming box to a set download and upload bandwidth but doesn't seem to be working.

 

Try set a limit it to say 1Mbps and see how it goes, otherwise maybe try a while without it entirely? Not sure what else you can do.