Intermittent latency spikes and packet loss throughout the day

[nlindo]

Recently started up service in an apartment with 1gbps speed. The good thing is speed hasn't been much of an issue, however I've notice multiple instances of packets dropping throughout the day rendering my VOIP (non xfinity) service unusable while on calls and causing the other party to not hear me or sound robotic to them. This also occurs on other apps such as discord, facetime, and teams across all devices on the network both over LAN and WLAN.

The weird part is that these only occur for about a minute each time and will then recover. I called comcast and had a technician come out to take a look. According to him, everything looked fine other than an old filter where our cabling runs through on the exterior so he replaced that. He also replaced our modem for safe measure (I have an xfinity XB7) .

After those changes, it appears the issue hasn't improved. Went ahead and called customer support again and the support rep didn't have any path forward to a solution other than sticking on the idea that it could be a coax cable issue running from the modem to the wall. Even after explaining that the cable was brand new and have also tried a second cable. A factory reset on the modem was also suggested but that was already done as well.

So I went ahead and ran a continuous ping test using PingPlotter throughout my workday on my desktop that is running a Cat6 cable directly to the modem.

I ran simultaneous ping tests to see where the failure occurs when packets begin to drop. One of them being just the modem which shows no dropped packets throughout the day.

I then ran the test to the second hop which is an IP address starting with 96.120.xx.xxx. This IP address is the second hop for every ping test so all packets are running through this going outbound. Throughout the day, packet drops occur every 45 minutes to an hour and all look similar to this. The 10.223.xx.xx is the modem which I changed from the default 192.168.xx.xx address.

Pinging only second hop:

https://imgur.com/A2M2ZaZ

I also had another external website pinged at the same time to find similarities.

Pinging another external website:

https://imgur.com/QQrkFSq

All the drops seem to occur at the second hop and I'm curious what that 96.120.xx.xx node could be in this case. Seems like this would be a node external to the building or possibly on a pole? This complex only has 14 Units and most of the residents where out during this time but I could also see this possibly being shared with other nearby complexes.

Any insight to what could be causing this would be greatly appreciated!

[Puttygutt]

Hello,

I am having the same issue on Xfinity internet on home network.  We are receiving packet loss only on inbound traffic every 2-3 minutes.  Highly noticeable on video conferencing - Zoom and teams.  Also, notice issues using mobile phone for wireless calling through the home wireless network.

I have both wired and wireless using google mesh.  The Xfinity router (ARRIS Group, Inc. TG3482G) is set to bridge mode.  Since March, we've been working at home exclusively.  This issue started occuring on or around 9/17/2020.    Up to this point we had zero loss packet issues.

I receive no packet loss outbound, only inbound.  Receive 0 packet loss testing device to device within home network.

Nothing has changed on my internal network up to last Friday.  Out of frustration, I replaced all data cables, eliminated all uncessary wireless networks (i.e. guest), and moved router closer to cable source to eliminate distance.  

Same issue still occurs.   My hypothesis is something changed or needs to be fixed within Xfinity's network.

Peter