Severe bufferbloat/wifi lag with Orbi (recent)

it absolutely could have something to do with your ISP. That's the problem I have with the dslreports speed test - it hypes the bufferbloat aspect, but it does absolutely nothing to educate users as to what bufferbloat really means. The device causing problems could be anywhere between your local PC and wherever the speed test servers actualy reside. Without seeing data for every hop along the way, you can only guess where the problem really lies.

And yes, rebooting the modem is usually necessary when you switch the device that's connected to it, because they generally only support a single inside device, and need to have their bridging table "refreshed" to include the MAC address of the new device.

I see. So I've contacted Charter about this and they have to send a technician out. Honestly I've never had these bufferbloat issues affect me this bad before, so I hope it's on their end and it can be resolved. If not, I don't know enough about networking to get into the whole QoS or traffing shaping techniques to reduce the bufferbloat/latency.

I guess for now this is still unsolved :(

If the probelm is outside your home, any QOS settings you may apply are unlikely to have any effect as the QOS tags are generally stripped off / ignored once the traffic leaves your house. You can use QOS to prioritize traffic *inside* your house - like if you have many devices concurrently active, you can prioritize which devices or protocols your router will handle, but those tags are meaningless once the traffic leaves your house.

I've called my ISP (Charter) tech department and literally no one knows anything technical about any of this stuff. They've scheduled a "tech" to come out and look at the cable box and modem but I'm sure they won't know a single thing about this stuff either.

So if this is an outside home issue, I'm screwed. I did see that the firmware on my modem is slightly old and Netgear suggests called my ISP to have them update but Charter Spectrum says they cannot and will not update anything outside of their own equipment. So now I'm stuck in a black hole because Netgear says to update the firmware on your modem, call your ISP and when I call my ISP they say they don't do that.

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ggarabigie wrote:

I've called my ISP (Charter) tech department and literally no one knows anything technical about any of this stuff. They've scheduled a "tech" to come out and look at the cable box and modem but I'm sure they won't know a single thing about this stuff either.

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This doesn't surprise me at all, and if you mention the word "bufferbloat" to the field tech, you're likely to just get a deer-in-the-headlights stare back. It's a complex issue, and not many will be well-versed in it. And even if they are, troubleshooting it is not particularly simple. The tech should be able to check and verify RF characteristics at your home to make sure it is within spec and possibly correct any signal issues, but beyond that, I don't expect there is much they can do.

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ggarabigie wrote:

So if this is an outside home issue, I'm screwed. I did see that the firmware on my modem is slightly old and Netgear suggests called my ISP to have them update but Charter Spectrum says they cannot and will not update anything outside of their own equipment. So now I'm stuck in a black hole because Netgear says to update the firmware on your modem, call your ISP and when I call my ISP they say they don't do that.

 

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 I'm not familiar with Charter's network or what sort of devices they support, but you might want to ask about support for DOCSIS 3.1 modems. The DOCSIS 3.1 specification mandates use of Active Queue Management (AQM) which is specifically intended to address bufferbloat problems. DOCSIS 3.0 supports AQM, but doesn't require it, so they may or may not use it. Upgrading to something that supports DOCSIS 3.1 might help, but only if the problem is on the cable network to begin with. If the problem is even farther upstream, well... it gets even more complicated.

I also tested with the direct connection to the modem and the dslreports.com data showed an F for bufferbloat. I returned my Orbi and reverted to my old Apple Airport Extreme system, so basically returned to the pre-Orbi state. Then I updated my modem from the existing Motorola SURFboard SB6120 (DOCSIS 3.0) to a new MB8600 DOCSIS 3.1 modem. This seems to have fixed the upload bufferbloat. The results are still very bad for download, but as guzzijason pointed out to me and you, that seems more like the check engine light of bufferbloat tests, with no way to tell what's contributing upstream. Anyway, my non-scientific conclusion (polling the gamers in the family) is that the upgraded DOCSIS 3.1 modem helped. I'll be back on the trail of an improved router soon. I have no way to say, but I wonder if the ability of the Orbi to improve the connection speed on the end-node systems just exposes (and makes worse) the bufferbloat problems that were already present *without* the router. If so, then I'm hoping the DOCSIS 3.1 modem upgrade fixed the real problem as well as possible and a speedier router will not expose the problems again.

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ggarabigie wrote:
Charter Spectrum doesn’t even support DOCSIS 3.1 unfortunately.

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 Bummer. Looks like they have it as a work-in-progress, at least - they pretty much have to support 3.1 if they plan to do gigabit:
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Charter-Spectrum-Gigabit-Speeds-Coming-Very-Soon-140688

FWIW, the MB8600 modem I bought uses the color of the connection indicator light to tell you whether it connected using DOCSIS 3.0 or 3.1. Handy!