Packet Loss ?

[mitchmagi]

What % packet loss do most users experience ?

Is it a common thing amongst ADSL users in SA ? Is there any way to reduce it and does it significantly ( read noticeably ) boost download speeds ?

 

[WickedWeasel]

I have a 512k ADSL,

On local pings out of 100 I maybe get 1 packet lost at most,

International sometimes 2 out of 100, however this all depends on how far you are from the exchange, what quality you are getting our your line, your type of modem ect

 

[damian24]

Part of the packet loss comes from oversubscription by Telkom of the DSLAMS, I was having similar problems on my lines for one of the DSLAMS our lines were on I had one of the guys at IPNET check it out, he removed the throttle on the DSLAM and woilla, the packet loss was gone, unfortunately he put it back again 20 minutes later and closed our call.

So it boils down to a bandwidth cap on the DSLAM connection to ATM.

 

[ScrnScrm]

dont want to get too technical here, but i would like to point the following out about pings :

a. because a ping reports packet loss, doesnt necessarily mean you are actually experiencing packet loss. it just means that a packet hasnt returned in the default amount of time allowed for. this is normally caused by high latency due to congestion (and the fact that telkom actually shape ICMP traffic).
b. if you want to get a more realistic indication of response, try increasing the time window allowed for a ping to return to your PC (ping -w [time in milliseconds] hostname) eg. ping -w 2500 196.25.1.1

this will show you actual latency experienced by ICMP traffic. Cool to play with after you have been capped, you can actually check to see how bad the latency really is on the 165.165 network...