High loaded latency in BSNL FTTH

[sayantan45]

Hi everyone,
I’ve been facing persistent issues with high loaded latency on my BSNL Bharat Fiber connection. While idle pings are usually fine, as soon as the connection comes under load even during basic browsing, Zoom calls, or file downloads the latency spikes to 400ms, 500ms, or even higher, making real-time tasks nearly unusable.
I'm trying to build a constructive, evidence-based case to escalate this issue effectively to BSNL.

I’d like to escalate this issue constructively but need help gathering proper data. As usual, over a two minute call with the engineer he described spiked pings in gateway or loaded latency to be quite normal. So I have to show him using applications.

 

[sayantan45]

tagging @!!..PD..!! @sloj @Anurag Bhatia for help.
while SQM solves this to some extend, not liking their carelessness.

 

[sloj]

You haven't provided any information on what setup and config you use. You can use a screen capture app like OBS Studio and show the engineer your issue. That being said, latency will go higher if you saturate the connection bandwidth which happens when you do things like speed test or downloads.
I have used SQM and it works fine and my guess is you haven't configured it correctly.

 

[!!..PD..!!]

I think he wants bsnl to provide SQM like internet the way airtel fiber provides so that users don't have to go openwrt or get SQM supported routers.

P.S: I don't know about airtel fiber as I don't have enough experience with it. A friend of mine from Hyderabad has no bufferbloat on his Nokia ONT and he doesn't use any add on routers.

 

[!!..PD..!!]

@sloj I know a guy who has no bufferbloat on Archer C6 stock firmware. He has 200 mbps plan but gets 190 mbps speed with no bufferbloat. Even BSNL doesn't know why he has slow speed issue but on the bright side no bufferbloat at all..

 

[ka2107]

@!!..PD..!! I have Airtel Wired Fiber connection. I am running OpenWrt with SQM. But even with SQM disabled, what I noticed is that Airtel has no bufferbloat on the downstream (download) direction but has bufferbloat on the upstream (upload) direction.

I guess Airtel is doing some kind of bufferbloat control on their end before the data packets reach the customer in the download direction.

On the upload direction, I guess the ONT is not equipped to handle SQM for the high upload bandwidth. Most of the ONT use hardware acceleration of some sort that does not work with SQM.

 

[!!..PD..!!]

@ka2107 looks like BSNL is doing reverse.. It has little to no bufferbloat on upload side but download is full of it.

 

[sloj]

Before the upgrade of hardware on BSNL side, there was some traffic management on their side. Latency used to be low but speed never crossed the limit. Now, the speed goes beyond the limit. I have 250 Mbps but reaches 280 Mbps. If traffic management like SQM is applied, 90-95% of the speed will be used which brings it back to the way things were before and speed will be close to 250 Mbps.

If they make things like they used to be, then there will be lots of people complaining about not getting their "full speed".

 

[!!..PD..!!]

BSNL won't do it for such a small number of people..

 

[sayantan45]

I have used Airtel on their stock ONT and Hathway too, never experienced bufferbloat on those. Hathway i had a 40Mbps plan and i used to get 60mbps constantly and brust speeds upto 200mbps(shockingly good even in far away servers). Airtel was good too.

Also used Tata play fiber over a year very good speeds. All the experiences were with stock ONTs and 10 PCs, 12 devices most of the time. Handled pretty well.
[these experience were from kolkata]

Now back in my HomeTown I have only BSNL and some other local providers like alliance and GTPL, but not better.

Now the problem with BSNL is bufferbloat, earlier it used to be minimal, like other providers. Recently I even checked another LCO in our area who provides BSNL FTTH, tested there with fast.com it was definately lower than my current LCO, like 300-400ms vs 35ms ( acceptable imo), the waveform bufferbloat still showing similar results. But it's just a lot of hassle to change LCO, I have to go local office for disconnection req and then get a new one.

my setup is Uniway ONT (bridge mode) + TP-Link Archer C6 V3.2 (OpenWRT)