fwiw, if it was me, I'd complain to TT and say you didn't expect the upload to be less than half what you had previously, and demand to be returned to using VDSL. That's assuming the new VDSL connection will be as good as what you had previously.
Is 320m distance to cabinet measured direct, or by following likely paths the old telephone wires take around the roads?
Imho, unless it is less than 200m, it may be hit or miss with regards to benefits of Gfast.
From an SQM perspective, if your uploads kill the network performance not only for the uploading computer, but for all machines in your LAN, try the following:
The two tricks here are a) the dual-xxxhost keywords which instruct cake to share capacity fairly between internal IP addresses, that is your GDrive uploading computer will not be able to hog all/most upload capacity if other machines want to send something (but without competition the GDrive upload should still saturate your uplink). And ingress instructs cake to essentially automatically adjust the download shapers aggressiveness to the actual responsiveness of the incoming traffic. See https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/sqm-details for more information (also how to do a quick and dirty test whether the router's CPU might be overloaded).
Note with these shaper-rate settings you can at best expect the following TCP/IPv4 goodput (what speedtests measure and report):
9.4500 * ((1500-20-20)/(1500+44)) = 8.94 = Mbps
7.110 * ((1500-20-20)/(1500+44)) = 6.72 Mbps
as shaper rates are gross rates, while speedtests report net payload throughput...
I would, unless the router is already overloaded, set the shaper to 105000 and 8000 respectively, so those speeds that you get without SQM as speedtest results (and only decrease these if latency under load suffers too much).
Are you testing the ping from the same machine you are downloading from? Do you have a dedicated AP or does your router need to do both sqm and WiFi?
And do perform the MTR tests, Bill recommended... you can BTW run mtr from your router:
use opkg update ; opkg install mtr if mtr is not already installed and invoke it like: mtr -ezb4w -c 120 pingbox1.thinkbroadband.com
for getting a nice report for ~2 minutes of pings (you can copy and paste the terminal output here in the forum), or use: mtr -ezb4 pingbox1.thinkbroadband.com
to get a continuous updated mtr output in the terminal.
Side-note: pingbox1.thinkbroadband.com seems to be the host that Thinkbroadband uses for their network quality monitoring, so running mtr against that allows you to compare your results with those recorded and displayed with a thinkbraodbandprobe giving you a view from both sides.
I completely forgot about the tools you’d suggested Bill. I’ve setup a Broadband Quality Monitor test on thinkbroadband, this morning. I’ve only had the test running for an hour so not much to report in the below image. And my network / desktop computer isn’t on yet so there’s not much traffic.
I'm going off the conversation with the Openreach engineer when they visited the property. I believe their testing equipment measured the line from the cabinet to where it runs into the block of flats at 320m. I live on the 2nd floor of a tenenment building so there will another telephone line that brings that into the flat property and to the final master phone point where the router is connected. It's my understanding the Openreach engineer wasn't able to measure the distance from the common area entry point to the master socket in my flat.
I found SCAN computers were selling the R4AG both on their own site and eBay. With next day delivery.
I've tried both, I've run a ping test on the desktop uploading to Gdrive. I've also tried the ping whilst the desktop is on, but running it from my phone and on an ssh connection from the router. WiFi is using a separate BT Whole Home WiFi AP mesh network. The master WiFi disc is connected to the router via a LAN cable.
Thanks for the SQM and mtr suggestions, moeller0. I'll see how they stack up this morning.
Here's the output of the MTR tests which I ran from an ssh on the R4AG router. I'd implimented the suggested SQM changes from moeller0 whilst this test was running and my desktop / GDrive machine was off:
Nothing jumping out, the "Wrst" column is a bit higher than I would expect, but since it is mostly the end-host that gives reliable reports, 12.3 to 21.6 is not great, but also not terrible, also no packet loss (but then this were just 120 packets).
For getting a better handle on loss, maybe let mtr run continously while you are away: mtr -ezb4 pingbox1.thinkbroadband.com
and just look at the results after a few hours (and copy and paste here)....
Also interesting to repeat this mtr-experiment while you are actually loading your link.
And finally, would e good to see the output of tc -s qdisc...
Agreed, I think it's poor upload speed from the property to the cabinet or somewhere else outside the property that's causing the issue. A direct connection the G.Fast modem never peaks beyond 8Mbps up. I'll try and get TalkTalk to switch me back to TalkTalk 60 / VDSL.
For future reference:
The latest SQM settings have done a good job on the R4GA.
The ping latency stays around 10-20ms even with the network under load (desktop computer on with GDrive running and uploading multiple files).
The download speed stays establish, usually around 90Mbps down but sometimes drops to 60-70Mbps. Thankfully the new SQM settings aren't causing the download rate to drop off a cliff when files are being uploaded. With the desktop computer uploading the upload rate is pretty poor though 1-2Mbps.
I've left the desktop uploading most of the morning but was unable to leave a local instance of mtr running. However, the Think Broadband test results are below collected from the on-going test on their side.
That computer is connected via WiFi? Could you, just for a test, run a wire between OpenWrt router and the desktop computer to figure out whether the issue might be related to what happens on the WiFi link?
Correct, it's connected via WiFi. I've ordered a cable which should arrive in the next couple of days to try this test. I currently have one that will stretch from the Desktop to the modem. Seems like the last logical thing to try.
