Huge amounts of packet loss.

[CyberModz]

Hi guys i am getting a lot of packet loss. When playing valorant i can see how many packets are being dropped. I have dropped over 3000 in 4 minutes causing an unstable playing experience. This gives me a lots of jitter and rubberbanding. Anyway to fix the packet loss. I am using the 4g network on my phone and sharing it over wifi hotspot. Any help will be nice.

Thanks,

[mikeliuk]

Hi @CyberModz ,

Is the situation improved if you tether to the phone by usb cable instead of WiFi hotspot?

What ping/latency and bandwidth do you see see on fast.com and speedtest.net on the gaming device at the time packet loss is observed?

[CyberModz]

When I tether the phone to the pc the packer loss and jitter are the same. On fast.com I get a download speed of 80mbps. The unloaded latency is 46ms and the loaded latency is 869ms with an upload of 5.3mbps. The speedtest.net shows 55mbps for the download and 7.5mbps for upload. The latency on speedtest.net is 35ms. The problem is web browsing latency is low and game latency is low, it's just that I keep dropping frames only in games, not web browsing. The packet loss is constant all the time in games. However when I come to run a traceroute on the game server IP or any other IP it fails and all of says not responding. Hope this is enough information, if you need more I can happily give it.

Thanks @mikeliuk 

[mikeliuk]

Hi @CyberModz ,

Those numbers check out ok. If you use Android, I would recommend to download the "Network Cell Info Lite" app and see what "RSSNR" (my router is currently showing 15 dBm which I am happy with, and my phone currently shows 12.0) is under the raw tab.

80 Mbps down is good, 46 ms is a little high and something nearer 33 ms would be better. 869 ms loaded is a tad high but within the realms of the expected. speedtest numbers usually are closer than you've described but this could easily be explained by the variability between servers.

Your traceroute is likely failing as some servers, possibly near the destination, are probably configured not to respond to ping/ICMP both to reduce load and as slight obfuscation against attackers.

If your RSSNR number checks out above, then you'll be hunting in the weeds for why you see this packet loss for your games, and the question will immediately come up whether you get such high packet loss even for general large downloads (e.g. a large ISO) or whether it is only for games or a few particular games.

As you get the packet loss read-out for the games, it may be best to request advice from the developers on how to further debug the issue as it's not a common thing for users to be aware of.

[CyberModz]

Thanks, @mikeliuk for the quick reply I looked on the app at the RSSNR, and shows 0.0, no idea what this is or what the right number is supposed to be but 0 looks wrong. However, my signal strength is not great as it is showing -123. I did try to traceroute the IP on the riots help site which is supposed to respond to pings. The first 3 show then not responding for another 20 or so until it ends. I heard that ipv6 might help as the CGNAT could cause congestion making it worse for packet loss, however, I'm not sure and new to this networking stuff. Any more information you need I can supply and thanks for this fast reply. I made an older thread about the ipv6 IP and if it was possible to share this when USB tethering to my pc.

Thanks,

[mikeliuk]

Hi @CyberModz ,

Assuming the app is working, I think we should conclude that the RSSNR is low. You can check at https://usatcorp.com/faqs/understanding-lte-signal-strength-values/ what higher values might be more desirable. It's surprising that you would measure such a high download bandwidth for such a low RSSNR.

From moving your device around and turning airplane mode on and off, you might find a position which reliably gives you a good RSSNR number (by connecting to a favourable cell tower).

To take a little of the guesswork out of things, you can check cellmapper.net to see where the nearest cell towers are. The app should give you sufficient details to identify the location of the cell tower you are connected to on https://opencellid.org/ (I find this service is less good for browsing but includes additional towers not present on cellmapper) and it's likely to be further away than you expect.

It's unlikely that 4G would be all the competitive for gaming and one can only hope that things improve with 5G, at least near a cell tower.

I suspect a correct IPv6 configuration would be difficult to achieve unless you are gaming directly on the mobile (I would guess the hotspot hands out IPv4 addresses and use IPv4 NAT). USB tethering may give you additional options to play with IPv6 networking.

My Netgear MR1100 doesn't support IPv6 on the LAN (even though it can take a IPv6 address on the WAN) so I'm not much motivated to read into IPv6 mobile networking yet. 😂

[CyberModz]

Thanks, @mikeliuk I used cell mapper to see how close or what towers are near my location. There seem to be 3 of them but the third one is a bit too far. So the first one only does 3 band 3s at 20mghz which I am connected to only connecting to one band 3 not using all 3. However, the second one does have some bands 3 and 7 which when I connect to this when out can get download speeds of 250mbps. Any way to force band 7 from where I am at to see if I can connect to it? Still tried restarting phone and airplane mode but still not getting an RSSNR just says 0.0. Anyway about the ipv6 android does give me the ipv6 IP but not the gateway so no way to manually set it up in windows. However, when using the device I ran an ipv6 test to which I am getting one. All weird to me, I think it is the CGNAt causing some of this issue as it may be running on a strict NAT type. Trouble is that I cant use my broadband for gaming as it is running on ADSL and getting 150ms and 5mbps down to 500kbps up. So very bad for me thought EE won't have this much issue for pings and gaming.

If you need any more information I can happily give it but other than this thanks for the post, hopefully, I can fix this.

Thanks,

[mikeliuk]

Hi @CyberModz ,

I feel that your best hope may be to get your ADSL connection fixed as a ping/latency of 150 ms feels much too high and you can quote your 4G LTE latency as evidence that's unreasonable. You might also check whether your ADSL provider has guaranteed any minimum bandwidth above 5 Mbps that could trigger a test of your line. You could quote the 500 kbps up as unreasonably low.

I personally only need to pay attention to RSSNR but you'll need to check RSRP and RSRQ to see if they are at least "good" based on https://usatcorp.com/faqs/understanding-lte-signal-strength-values/ Fair or poor are unlikely to be suitable for gaming.

Apparently Android won't support DHCPv6 for technical reasons mentioned on https://www.techrepublic.com/article/androids-lack-of-dhcpv6-support-poses-security-and-ipv6-deploym... but instead SLAAC should be used but it seems like a rabbit hole of reading. I would at some point like to have my devices publicly routable by IPv6 but it's a few days of reading and thinking at least! (It's not currently clear to me what the correction configuration is on a Windows 10 laptop to get IPv6-only access to the internet via a mobile phone, I don't even know if EE assigns a prefix such as /64 or other size or a single address.)

Gaming via 4G LTE and a mobile phone hotspot is perhaps the combination of the two worst things. You can't do anything about the cell tower location so your only other option is a 4G LTE router, some are able to select particular bands. 4G LTE routers are pretty expensive, even a Netgear MR1100 from Amazon Warehouse which I use, and there is no guarantee that it would help (it might if you can put the router in a superior location).

Looking into things further, SLAAC makes a lot of sense. Other threads give the below reference for getting an IPv6 prefix but apparently at that time of writing, unsolicited traffic is not forwarded so the devices will not be routable on the IPv6 internet. Kinda also makes sense from a security perspective but a little inconvenient in comparison to historical publicly routable IPv4 addresses.

https://github.com/jamesmacwhite/hh70-ee/wiki/IPv6-support