PPP dropping regularly? I may have solved it.

[alexatkin]

I'm surprised you were so open about this, its much appreciated.

Was this ever raised with Thales or is it just being accepted as normal due to the lack of an SLA for residential connections?

Does it seem to happen to random customers or perhaps is there a pattern that its affecting certain segments of the network? Worse still, does it happen to everyone?

Its particularly interesting to hear from yourselves as you too have your own extensive fibre network. As such may I ask if you would consider this sort of thing happening on the network as acceptable?

[jody-ASK4]

Yes it's been raised with Thales by us and other ISPs.....

We've not found any pattern to the location and have seen it across a large number of customers. As it's intermittent it's hard to tell.

Would I consider this acceptable on a fibre leased line? No, but they're different products with a considerably different SLA. Do I consider this acceptable on a residential service? Not really but I'm sure you can see we're not exactly pushing our residential side of DR. Also, people do appear to be using the network without issues, we've got customers (resi and busi) that love the service.

[SpencerUk]

@jody-ASK4

Do you have this same issue with your normal customers outside DR?

[jody-ASK4]

(03-06-2013 03:59 PM)SpencerUk Wrote:  @jody-ASK4

Do you have this same issue with your normal customers outside DR?

No, only seen it on DR. Our other customers do run on different platforms (non PPP) than our DR customers however as I said above, I've seen the same issue with and without PPP (on DR).

[alexatkin]

So its definitely not all users then?

The reason I ask is I would expect only a minority to even know routers HAVE logs, let alone be watching them like a hawk. I myself have only noticed the drop out a couple of times in actual usage, without seeing the PPP drops in the router log I would have assumed it was temporary issues on the Internet itself and ignored it.

Its even more curious that I seem to be less affected than @mirdragon who was unable to stop PPP dropping, yet I have been able to achieve that it seems. I can only assume my down time must be shorter, or perhaps Origin have a longer timeout on their PPP server.

I'm not going to worry about it unless I notice it having a detrimental effect on my usage, but its interesting to know what to look for if I have any unusual packet loss. It certainly might explain the fact we seem to always have a certain amount of packet loss showing on the pingtest graphs when that shouldn't really be happening.

[mirdragon]

I initially spotted the problem though before we went to PPPoE as online gaming was being disconnected on a regular basis, it was only when we went to PPPoE that I could then fully investigate it - but IMO you shouldn't have to put up with the disconnections or mask the issue.

Digital Region really need to sort it out, it's been ongoing now for coming up to 3 years which is more than enough time for them to investigate it and look at providing a solution. As mentioned previously since moving back to BT I've never had these issues. Yes I've had a couple of disconnections with quite a few being me changing configuration settings, etc, etc but from BT themselves since moving I've probably had about 6 overall (upgrades, card faults, maintenance)

[alexatkin]

Certainly not acceptable considering the Digital Region network is meant to be a premium service fit for council, schools and NHS use. (then again, its probably an improvement on what my old GPs used to use, went down all the bloody time)

Even if what we are getting as residential customers is very good value for the money (assuming it is correct that its uncontended), they are not living up the promise of the network. Its a concern if its actually fit for NHS home care if the connection cannot be relied upon.

Perhaps I should ask Origin if they see any unusual packet loss on my connection. It should be pretty obvious as normal disconnections reset the PPP session whereas the network glitched ones do not. I would expect there to be some sort of log of active PPP sessions that are not responding, particularly as thanks to TBB ping test my connection should ALWAYS be busy passing a few ICMP packets.

To be fair, I'm afraid to chase this up too much as I just know Thales will do something idiotic like mess up my line profile even though my sync is rock solid stable and considering its been up 60 days and my upstream SNR has dropped to nearly 3dB due to the warm weather, my FEC and HEC errors remain low.

A resync now would be annoying as obviously my upstream would reduce to establish 6dB again and its been fun seeding The Humble Bundle (go check that out, 2 more days of Telltale games for dirt cheap including The Walking Dead on Steam and Back to the Future, Wallace & Grommit, Sam & Max Season 3, all DRM free) and seeing how close to my limit it gets.

[jody-ASK4]

(03-06-2013 09:43 PM)alexatkin Wrote:  So its definitely not all users then?

The reason I ask is I would expect only a minority to even know routers HAVE logs, let alone be watching them like a hawk. I myself have only noticed the drop out a couple of times in actual usage, without seeing the PPP drops in the router log I would have assumed it was temporary issues on the Internet itself and ignored it.

Again it's hard to tell, we see the PPP session timeout on our side and we tear it down however if someone just switches their CPE off we'll see the same thing i.e. their device stops responding to the the echo requests. If we look through our logs we'll pretty much see that PPP to all users have dropped at some point or another but whether each event is due to this intermittent issue or the dog knocking out the power from the router it's not really possible to tell from here.

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(04-06-2013 10:18 AM)alexatkin Wrote:  Perhaps I should ask Origin if they see any unusual packet loss on my connection. It should be pretty obvious as normal disconnections reset the PPP session whereas the network glitched ones do not. I would expect there to be some sort of log of active PPP sessions that are not responding, particularly as thanks to TBB ping test my connection should ALWAYS be busy passing a few ICMP packets.

Origin will log PPP session status changes (normal terminations, keepalive timeouts etc.) as viewed from their end.

[alexatkin]

You see that's the interesting thing.

If I switch off my router then when it fires back up it will establish a new session. Now with the new echo timeouts I have set if it stops responding due to Digital Region issues it keeps the current session active. It seems Origin do not tear down the session due to it only being unavailable for 15 seconds or so. At least that is how it seems to work on my connection.

So the question would be if Origin can tell there was packet loss even though it wasn't severe enough to bring the PPP session down?

[mirdragon]

(04-06-2013 01:41 PM)alexatkin Wrote:  You see that's the interesting thing.

If I switch off my router then when it fires back up it will establish a new session. Now with the new echo timeouts I have set if it stops responding due to Digital Region issues it keeps the current session active. It seems Origin do not tear down the session due to it only being unavailable for 15 seconds or so. At least that is how it seems to work on my connection.

So the question would be if Origin can tell there was packet loss even though it wasn't severe enough to bring the PPP session down?

What settings are you using now, don't forget the PPP will only drop and re-authenicate if your equipment never received the x number of concurrent failure requests - Origin will probably only be looking for the PPP connection dropping and re-authenicating and if not then not a lot then can do as unless fully monitoring in place they would have no need to query anything