Diagnose latency?

[bcastner]

My neighbor is driving me crazy.

He called me two weeks ago because he had purchased for his home a bunch of wireless equipment and could not make it work.

If found he had an 802.11a router, a PCMCIA 802.11g adapter, and two USB 802.11b adapters. I had him pack everything back up, returned to the store and bought the Linkys WRT54G, a WPC54G PCMCIA, and two Linksys 54G PCI adapters.

There have been some software updates for most of these devices, including firmware for the router this week alone. I have applied all the patches, noted issues with Windows hotfix for WPA, etc. and as far as I can tell the network works perfectly well.

What is driving me absolutely crazy is that crazy is that the neighbor went to wireless and a cable connection becuase he felt his dial-up was too slow. It turns out that there is one site in the entire world that he wants to access, and he feels that the new wireless connection is too slow for him. He has begun downloading every wacky speedup utility available from a Google search.

Now, how do I create a credible test of his connectivity to this single site: http:\\

http://www.gameshownetwork.com

The site will not respond eventually from a traceroute, but I would like advice about how the steps to document any and all latency between his desktop and this site.

 

[jimbopalmer]

the Theory

http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/Latency.html

in practice

http://www.broadbandreports.com/tweaks

63.251.200.200 sure is hard to trace route to, I get lost in Los Angeles

I tried to remain child-like, all I acheived was childish.

 

[bcastner]

jimbo,
Thanks for testing the site for me.

Your reference to

http://www.broadbandreports.com

gladens my heart, I think it is a wonderful site and the tweak test and drtcp utility are just great. For those who have never visited the site, the testing and tweaking utilities available are just great stuff. And the Forums for various ISP and hardware vendors are fantastic. (I should note that I am an MVM on this site, which like a Microsoft MVP is is awarded in a mysterious process that does not imply any financial benefit. And yields none, although it is an honor worth having.)


As the site is essentially non-pingable (my neighbor believes this is a problem on his network side) I am going to let a traceroute, ping /t and traceping run for several hours, print it out and try to convince him again that the problem is not his network. I think I am getting closer, as I had him traceroute from work ( a DSL connection from Verizon, 1.5/256) and his results from a wired desktop were singificantly worse than his home connection wireless on cable (promised 1.1/256). Right now the worst I get as an internal side connection is 3ms from workstation client to router, 1 ms to the hop from router to the first headend at the cable side. Usually the wireless clients show 1ms reliably to the Linksys router, and 1 ms for the router to throw the packet to the cable modem.

My newest torture is that 'some guy I work with has some software that like triples the speed of your connection. it is like a hack that Microsoft does not want you to know about.' Which turned out to be a registry change to allow more than the default connections under IE.


sigh,

My sainted wife tells me to be nice, 'he's our neighbor', and I am trying. But somehow there must be a way to drop a 300 page book of connection tests on the guy to get him off my back.

If this was a paying client it would not be a problem. I would give a summary of the ping tests localy, the traceroutes for external sites, the MTU and RWIN values that I used, and nicely agree that if the client felt someone else would do a better job, let them. I leave a very clean documentation trail behind. In 90% of the cases I get a call back within a month: hey, just kidding.

But it is hard in this situation, a neighbor. I have already done three site surveys with Netstumbler to locate the router, as his wife is concerned "I see those ugly black things in my sleep, what would our guests think" and right now have it located on top of a 10' curio cabinet on the first floor. I have tried to see if one could see the darn thinkg from anywhere in the Living Room, and it is invisible to me. But my neighbor no complains that his wife cannot sleep "I see these ugly black things haunting me."

Sheeeesh.

This weekend is it for me, out of pocket I bought a small omni and a panel antenna, I am going to hide the whole thing behind the curio cabinet, using a lot of velcro strips, rewire the outlet available so that it has a decent earth ground, out of pocket purchase a powerline bridge between modem and router, locate the modem in the attic, and re-test everything.

And then sainted wife or not, tell the neighbor to not call me unless someone is dying.

 

[jimbopalmer]

I used Mac TCP Watcher locally (in Mississippi) so I can assure you it is not a PC issue, then tried a visual route from Virginia.

http://visualroute.visualware.com/

both of them get lost in L.A.

Mr. Cheshire is leading the IETF's ZEROCONF committee (his Apple job title is Wizard without Portfolio)

I tried to remain child-like, all I acheived was childish.

 

[bcastner]

jimbo,

You have gone well beyound the call to duty. I sincerely appreciate the efforts on my behalf.