NanoPi R4S OpenWRT grade A, can anyone in NZ get less than an A?

eonsim:

 

can anyone in NZ get less than an A?

 

You mean like the B in the very first post?

KiwiSurfer:

 

I've come across bufferbloat issues on 300/100 connections in the past so it can happen.

 

One obivous symptom for bufferbloat for me is dropped frames on Zoom/Teams/etc calls. In my experience these can be pretty common on certain routers where there is several other connections in flight. Even as simple as computer A downloading a large file via Bitorrent and computer B on a Zoom call can trigger bufferbloat -- but have also seen it triggered in networks where there's a lot of active connected devices with lots of different kinds of activity.

 

You're right that in theoy it shouldn't be a big issue, but in reality some of the lesser router struggle with this. The worst offenders include some of the older RSP supplied gear e.g. the Netcomm router Slingshot used to supply some years ago bufferbloated so bad I quickly switched that out for a different router. I acknowledge current RSP gear are much better now which is great to se.

 

Thanks for confirming. I have always assumed that if the router could handle the connection as measured by raw download speed then it's more likely to be the wifi when people complain of problems with videoconferencing. But this shows it could pay to check the router too - who knows what devices are still out there. 

/taking note, so next time @cddt complains about anything broadband-related we can ask "have you replaced your old, B-Grade router yet?"

But more importantly, what are you going to do to fix it for you now?

KiwiSurfer:

 

I've come across bufferbloat issues on 300/100 connections in the past so it can happen.

 

One obivous symptom for bufferbloat for me is dropped frames on Zoom/Teams/etc calls. In my experience these can be pretty common on certain routers where there is several other connections in flight. Even as simple as computer A downloading a large file via Bitorrent and computer B on a Zoom call can trigger bufferbloat -- but have also seen it triggered in networks where there's a lot of active connected devices with lots of different kinds of activity.

 

I had problems in the past with video conferencing, and using a mikrotik  with queuing fixed that. 

The problem is with things like Netflix which suck data much faster than they need to and then sit idle until the next burst of traffic. So you might have a UHD Netflix stream that needs 15 Mb/s, and 300 Mb/s connection, but the problem is that it doesn't use 15 Mb/s continuously. What it does it suck down the next chunk at 300 Mb/s for 1 second, then spend 19 seconds idle at 0 Mb/s, and then do the next chunk. During the 1 second that it is at full tilt you can have some issues with video conferencing,

If you had a 1 Gb/s connection then this would be a shorter period of interruption, but Netflix is still capable of saturating even quite fast connections.

The buffer bloat test really should be done comparatively, i.e between different CPE/devices/configurations.

A one off test doesn't tell you much as the internet has things all over the place which buffer, or not.
Its also important to note that short buffers are not great for TCP performance as you get discards rather than some queuing. For TCP throughput you want buffers.  For realtime applications you prefer a small amount of packet loss.
There are several types of queuing/buffering mechanisms which work differently and achieve different outcomes.

Unfortunately home users cant re-architect the internet end-to-end and tweaking your ingress/egress router buffers and/or, if you are really keen, individual PC queues/buffers/algorithms can only go so far.  i.e in the RSP, LFC and, probably, your home network, its not as if you can split applications out to handle them in different ways or prioritise them differently.

freitasm:

 

/taking note, so next time @cddt complains about anything broadband-related we can ask "have you replaced your old, B-Grade router yet?"

 

But more importantly, what are you going to do to fix it for you now?

 

Very true, can't complain about dropped frames on Teams until I get this fixed... 

What am I going to do? I am going to encourage my wife to go back to work next year so the household budget withstands a new router (have my eye on a Grandstream). :)

I got a B with an old Spark provided HG659b on max fibre (900/500) but I'm not really worried about it.

Used to be a real problem for gaming latency back in the xDSL days when bit torrent was popular and running wild, leading to gamers running pfsense and flashing various open source firmware on Linksys WRt54GLs (ah memories) but not so much these days.

Purely to see if it can be done in NZ.   Has anybody managed to get an A+ bufferbloat rating?    I've been experimenting with tuning on my  opnsense based router.  And have managed to get close to the A+ level but never quite there.  

Actually just answered my own question.   Managed to get an A+ result this morning;

alavaliant:

 

Purely to see if it can be done in NZ.   Has anybody managed to get an A+ bufferbloat rating?    I've been experimenting with tuning on my  opnsense based router.  And have managed to get close to the A+ level but never quite there.  

 

Read up, I posted earlier that I get an A+.

KiwiSurfer:

 

Read up, I posted earlier that I get an A+.

 

Whoops I missed that in the middle of your message.  Nice.

C on a 300/100 plan:

https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat?test-id=5e871047-d89c-4f01-9024-21b222f32bd8

Mikrotik HAP ax^2

I've not implemented any queues as there's no need.