Hoping for someone with a little more kwnoledge than myself to help me work this one out as I’m stumped!
I have BT Infinity Broadband, Fibre to the premises - 50mb Down / 10mb Up
I have replaced the BT Home Hub with a Mikrotik RB2011UiAS.
I have no problems getting connected to the BT Service using pppoe and I get my full speed when running a speed test with nice low pings below 5ms.
Here comes the interesting bit…
I have recently been seeing really high latency on my line 300ms+ which has also been slowing my broadband down to around 5-30mb down. I called BT to complain but they said they cant see a problem. So I switched out the Mikrotik for the Home Hub just to see if it was the router. I left the home hub in place for a couple hours and it was fine. I put the Mikrotik back in and after maybe 10/15 min the latency issue would come back.
I ran a test with the Mikrotik -
I disconnected everything from my network apart from the laptop I hard wired straight into the mikrotik
I ran a ping from CMD to google.com whilst running a speed test at the same time. Before the speedtest started I was seeing pings of sub 5ms as expected. When the test kicked off for the download portion, my ping jumped to around 40-50ms to google.com. Now here is the odd bit…when it got to the upload part of the speed test my CMD google ping spiked to 300ms+.
I thought that was odd so I did the same ping again but this time I downloaded an ISO from Ubuntu - Pings went up to around 30-50ms again. But for the upload test I uploaded something to dropbox.com. My pings to google.com spiked to over 300ms again.
I ran all of these tests again but with the BT Home hub this time and the pings whilst downloading jumped to around 30-50ms as they did with the mikrotik. When running an upload my pings remained at sub 5ms.
So can anyone explain why when doing an upload with the mikrotik my pings skyrocket basically making surfing for anyone else unusable? Uploads with the home hub are fine. I have just moved house and I am using the same mikrotik I did at the old house and I didn’t experience this problem as far as I remember there.
I cant find the MTU on the Home Hub 5 but I did the CMD test to work out what my MAX MTU is while I had the home hub connected
I ran ping www.google.com -f -l xxxx changing the number till I found the largest packet I could that didn’t fragment and then added 28 to it. This gave me a Max MTU with the home hub of “1492”
I checked the mikrotik and the MTU settings on the pppoe interface are
MAX MTU : 1458
MAX MRU : 1458
MRRU : 1600
So my MTU is actually set less on the mikrotik to the MAX MTU I worked out with the above calculation for the Home Hub.
The MTU on the mikrotik eth1 interface; which is the interface the WAN connection for the pppoe to dial out of is as follows. (I don’t know if the MTU on this port makes a difference or just on the pppoe?)
if they dont exist create them with your correct ppooe interface name make sure they are ordered before any Forward Drop Rules and repeat the speedtest.
See attached config file - was a bit to long to put in a post.
There are quite a few firewall rules in there which I know you will probably pick up on and mention but most of them are switched off and were only used for testing. I do need to go through and tidy up the ones im no longer using.
Well if you can’t reset the device because you need the configs then upgrade to latest firmware, i went through the changelog and there are quite a few relevant updates for pppoe-client since 6.34.2
An update definitely needs to be done - I agree with you here.
I used to be on top of regular updates but now am a little apprehensive as most people are when you haven’t upgraded in a while to do such a major upgrade so have kept putting it off!
I have backups so should be fine, this problem is just going to have to force me to upgrade now which is definitely a good thing.
I do need to clean up the config so will have to find a weekend some time to go through what I want to keep and export it then wipe the device and re import the configs I want to keep.
I will try an upgrade tonight and give you an update! Fingers crossed that solves the problem!
Quite sure upgrade will fix it, there are problems on that version with the pppoe-client MRU and fasttrack was not yet implemented that’s why the rules added had no effect , Give us an update when done!
When you apply fasttrack to certain traffic it won’t go through flter mangle or queues, so it doesn’t hit the cpu which increases throughput, downside you won’t be able to apply queues or firewall rules to that traffic. the default rule still gives quite a lot of control in firewall since it’s only applies to rel,est connections, but you can’t apply queues to it and that is just not acceptable if you have a low speed connection and need to manage bandwidth.
*I initially had a CRS112 with 400mhz cpu and without fasttrack over pppoe fiber 300/300mbps the speedtest wouldn’t go over 30mpbs and 100% cpu i even considered returning it but decided to read up before when i added the fasttrack rule to the pppoe connection i’d get 320/320mbps and around 30% cpu usage. That said ended up with an RB750Gr3 4 cores 880mhz and can easly handle the pppoe max speed without the need for fasttrack so i can apply mangle and queue trees to all traffic.
I don’t see a problem. Uploading at the max bandwidth of 10Mbps will result in high latency. There are ways to adjust for it with custom queuing to reduce the high latency for desired traffic, such as ping for example. It will result in a slight, not very noticeable reduced upload speed for the big packets. Basically you can give certain traffic types higher queue priorities so the desired packets get to “jump in line” ahead of the big packets in the queue.
Perhaps the router provided by your ISP already does this. I believe the MT uses a FIFO queuing by default. I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong about that.
, Give us an update when done!