4000ms Ping / Lost Packets / Traceroute Issue

What you are showing here is that AT&T has episodes where its networks are overcommitted.  AT&T is rolling out a whole bunch of fiber connections with bandwidths of up to 5 Gbps and those people will use them, and AT&T hasn't necessarily scaled out their interconnecting networks to handle the traffic of all those high-bandwidth users.  

would be nice of them to fix their issues. Just saying, and their support can't apparently do anything or say anything other than it's a local issue at the home and send out a tech.

This has been going on for over a week in the SE Wisconsin area. It's frustrating.

We're here to help, @noisycricket83!

We've got a great article that covers everything you need to know about High Ping & Latency. You'll learn what acceptable ping is on the AT&T network, how to rule out the causes of high latency, and get Traceroute information. 

Slowdowns during peak hours are pretty common. These are times when most people come home, get their phones connected, and browse the internet. For any random spikes throughout the day, those could also be caused by network traffic. They may also be due to a device on your network that’s suddenly taking up too much bandwidth, and crowding out the other devices.

When you’re experiencing higher latency, we recommend using the Smart Home Manager to see the traffic bandwidth heading to each device. You can also check to see whether there’s one or two devices on your network using most of your bandwidth.

We'd recommend that you try rebooting your gateway. This can help to refresh your connection and potentially alleviate anything that's causing trouble with your internet connection. To do this manually, follow these steps:

1. Unplug the power cord from the back of your gateway or modem. If you have: 
   • An internal battery backup, remove it
   • DSL, unplug the phone cord from your modem or gateway
2. Wait 20 seconds.
3. Put the internal battery back in if you have one. 
4. Plug the power cord back in. If you have DSL service, reconnect the phone cord.
5. Wait for the gateway or modem to restart and your Broadband light to turn solid green. This can take up to 10 minutes.

Let us know if you have any questions. We'll be happy to get you the answers you need. 

Lacey, AT&T Community Specialist 

This is a widespread issue. It's been going on for about a week or so for me. AT&T's techs are going to keep telling you to restart your modem, reset to factory settings, or get a tech to come out to "check things". This screen shot I took from my laptop on wireless, but it happens on my wired connections as well and it usually is that same switch as @dylanswirk has in his screenshot. 32.130.17.199; It's terrible latency but it's also a lot of dropped packets.

Not that it will matter, but here's more evidence directly from their kit.

but it's also a lot of dropped packets.

Not actually.  DNS.GOOGLE had 0.0% loss.  Any intervening router may not respond to the TTL-expired packet used by traceroute to map the route, for example hop 5 apparently never responds.

Fair point. I think it's hard to tell when we lose connection if it's just a timeout or if we're actually losing packets. It could just be connection timeouts... Any thoughts on the issue here? Just an overloaded network?

Hi there, @chulderman. We understand that you both are getting high ping and latency. Let's look at that together. 

Thanks for your screenshots. Looks like now you are testing from the router on out. The traceroute statistics presented, is above the range of an acceptable test using this as a guide:

• 0 - 150ms means the connection is great
• 150 - 300ms is acceptable 
• Over 300ms may indicate an issue

So we are going to move to the AT&T Direct Message space, so we can look at things in a better light. You will see a chat icon appear, next to a bell icon, after we send the next message. Please reply there. 

If you do not see the next message right away, please log out of your forums account and back in. 

Looking forward to working with you soon. 

Matthew, AT&T Community Specialist

Hey Matthew (@Atthelp) - I don't mind helping you identify the issue in your own network. But I think it's pretty highly likely that you have issues in your core network given three users have now created accounts and corroborated this here as well as numerous people reporting issues on Nextdoor in the same area.

It would be fair to assume you have a regional problem on your hands, and the correct approach might also be to run this one up the flagpole. Create an incident in ServiceNow, page someone out on PagerDuty... but this isn't something the community team on the forums can fix....

EDIT (04/30): Matthew is great and is chasing this down internally. Fingers crossed!