Interpreting UI/Reports, PNM Viz Overview

RLo: Loss

Description

This visualization shows the loss in your network service to our test points in Australia. As we roll this out internationally we will add other regions to these visualizations.

Like other measures, this is the loss of packets from the agent on your computer through all of the network components to our test points and back again.

It does not just test the bit from your home to the telephone exchange because that is only one small part of the puzzle and you don’t ever just use that bit and you certainly don’t pay your service provider for just that bit!

There are links on this page to a short article about the typical components of a home internet service.

Real-world impacts

If you are struggling with poor response times from websites you visit and once they do respond the information continues to appear slowly in your browser then network loss may be an issue. The loss for connection-oriented protocols like TCP (used for images and text in your browser) is not a permanent loss – rather the two endpoints (such as your computer and a web server) agree what is missing and then agree to resend all of the data from the point at which we lost something. All of this retransmission of data appears as slow connections to us end-users.

If you use audio or video on your computer (such as Skype, FaceTime or social media-based calling) you could experience stuttering of the video or audio. This is because the underlying protocols (UDP usually) cannot retransmit lost data and gaps in the media result.

This is a “slow response” or a ‘quality of response’ issue – your network is working but just taking too long to respond to the initial requests you make, or the responses are of a bad quality in the case of video and audio.

What to look for

In this visualization, a higher number means a larger amount of loss.

Usually, these loss figures would be zero. Loss of 1 or 2 percent on a fast connection can be masked and will be less noticeable – more than that and you will start to see slowness (in the case of connection-based protocols like TCP – used for text and images in your browser) or poor quality (in the case of connectionless protocols like UDP – used for audio and video media).

How do we test

We send a few small packets from your agent to a point in the network which immediately sends them back to your agent. We can measure the number lost along the way and report that back to you.

What could cause Loss

There are three common causes of loss:

  • Genuine faults in the telecommunications infrastructure such as noise and line errors
  • Misconfiguration of the telecommunications equipment such as queuing or duplex settings
  • Capacity issues such as over-subscription or insufficient link speeds leading to loss.

None of these can be fixed by the home user (unless the issue lies in your home environment). Usually, these issues are the responsibility of your service provider.

Often, slow response is experienced by us but are not related to loss in the network – this is the primary use of this visualization – it allows us to take network loss out of the mix and focus elsewhere.

With that in mind, remember that other things often cause slow responses. Examples include:

      • DNS lookup delays (see the DNS visualization for details)
      • Network latency causing throughput issues due to TCP window size constraints (this is a bit specialized but start by looking at the latency visualization)
      • Poor web-server performance
      • Slow browser execution on your computer (too many tabs open doing too many things)
      • Poor computer performance (see the CPU, memory and filesystem visualizations)

Next steps to diagnose or repair for Residential Trial Customers

First, and most importantly, decide if your issues are related to network loss.

Don’t troubleshoot network loss if these numbers look okay – use them to eliminate network loss and start looking elsewhere for the reasons for your poor responses or poor media quality.

If you do see poor loss performance then you could narrow down the source of them using tools such as ping and traceroute to diagnose loss issues

If the issue proves to be with your service provider then forward your TelcoSI email containing the PDF report to your service provider and ask them to take a look at why you are seeing these high loss results. They can use the information on this page to understand how we test and they can also contact us for in-depth guidance on what our reports mean ‘under the covers’.

Paying customers can also get a breakdown of loss by network component, network region and a breakdown of response time contributors including DNS, connect time, service response and network throughput.

More visualization Overviews:

TelcoSIAdmin

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