High Ping, wondering why?

[Totalement]

Hey,

 

To begin with, I'm on BT in the UK, and we're on Infinity(1) which is copper broadband usually fetching around 16/2mbps. Recently however (for the past 2 days) the connection has been particularly shaky, especially when there is many devices on the network. It's 11:20pm here at the moment, and I'm currently fetching around 374ms (lowest) to well +1000ms through 4.4.2.2 with frequent timeouts and similar to 8.8.8.8, which I can remember as having a baseline of 28ms usually.

 

I'm wondering why this is. My sister recently purchased a laptop which I thought was the reason why, as for some reason Office 365 was using 1.5mbps of our upload bandwidth whilst installing last night, and I assumed that was the reason why the internet was in this state. But it's carrying on today, and I installed it earlier today. I even went to the extent of turning it off via BT Access Control (for some reason mac blocking isn't allowed in Home Hubs) and the ping didn't differ. The only time when the ping did differ is when I turned off the WiFi transmitters altogether, which returned it to the 28ms baseline. 

 

It's confusing me as we don't have any particularly high priority devices in the house. All there is, is my sister and mum's phones (4s and 5s), a 1st Gen Chromecast, my sister's PC (a Lenovo with "high speed" internet), my OnePlus X running CyanogenMod and my personal computer, which is running through a length of Cat5e.

 

I was also watching a twitch stream earlier, at source (which draws about 5mbps) with my sister and mother out, and so there being basically no activity on the network. It buffered which is odd, as the 16mbps connection we have should be plenty enough to stream twitch, and I have done so comfortably before these two days.

 

Also, if this is anything of note, a device earlier with a foreign mac address connected to our 2.4GhZ transmitter, with an "unknown" tag with it, usually associated with android devices like my OPX or other uncommon networking devices. I quickly access blocked it permanently and it later left our WiFi, however that hasn't resolved our issue whatsoever.

 

I'm pinging again at the end of writing this, and the results I've got are this:

 

C:\Users\nathl>ping 8.8.8.8 -t

Pinging 8.8.8.8 with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=492ms TTL=57
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=456ms TTL=57
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=461ms TTL=57
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=321ms TTL=57
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=389ms TTL=57
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=518ms TTL=57
Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=666ms TTL=57
Request timed out.

 

It's confusing me greatly, and I hope you guys can help. Thanks in advance. 

 

(attached are some screenshots of cmd, pinging 8.8.8.8 with router settings in the background)

[xGGAx]

18 minutes ago, Totalement said:

 

 The only time when the ping did differ is when I turned off the WiFi transmitters altogether, which returned it to the 28ms baseline. 

 

 

Also, if this is anything of note, a device earlier with a foreign mac address connected to our 2.4GhZ transmitter, with an "unknown" tag with it, usually associated with android devices like my OPX or other uncommon networking devices. I quickly access blocked it permanently and it later left our WiFi, however that hasn't resolved our issue whatsoever.

 

 

Sounds like someone  found your wireless password, somehow. I highly doubt this is some kind of hardware or configuration issue.

[xGGAx]

Option 1 :

Im not familiar with your router, but you should definitely change the SSID and password. Perhaps even disable SSID broadcast just in case. WPA2 encryption is fine so keep that. If you have an option to create a  list of trusted devices using MAC addresses then do it, block everything but your own devices.
 

Option 2:

check your windows configuration for onedrive, shared setting across devices and windows updates. I had a similar problem were my router showed over 171 GB of uploaded data vs 15GB downloaded. Turns out win 10 synchronizes all your files and settings across devices without even asking. Windows updates also make your computer like a web server to upload updates to other users. 

 

http://www.howtogeek.com/224981/how-to-stop-windows-10-from-uploading-updates-to-other-pcs-over-the-internet/

 

http://www.howtogeek.com/249254/how-to-stop-windows-10-from-using-so-much-data/

 

[Totalement]

14 hours ago, xGGAx said:

check your windows configuration for onedrive, shared setting across devices and windows updates. I had a similar problem were my router showed over 171 GB of uploaded data vs 15GB downloaded. Turns out win 10 synchronizes all your files and settings across devices without even asking. Windows updates also make your computer like a web server to upload updates to other users

Since last night, and this morning I installed glasswire on all PCs, and it turns out Onedrive was trying to back everything up. 

I'm also going to change the password, so foreign macs don't connect. Cheers guys. 

[FliesLikeABrick]

If you think the issue is on your network connection to your ISP, or something in your house - do troubleshooting like pings by pinging the default gateway of your ISP (that your router is using), rather than random sites.  So many sites are served from many datacenters/locations.  This, coupled with not knowing (or caring) where you are located, means your ping times to them will vary too much for that to be helpful troubleshooting info.

 

Set up a continuous ping to the default gateway that your router is using, it should show up in a status page.  Look to see if that breaks when the Internet "breaks".  Also install winMTR (or mtr if you're on linux/mac/bsd).  That will provide a continuous ping and traceroute, which helps show where damage is occcurring.

 

I recommend watching this talk on how to use/read traceroute/mtr correctly, 99% of people (even many network engineers) get it wrong: