Instability and low speeds on my 1 Gbit/s connection

You might want to start your own topic for this, or maybe a moderator can create it from your post.

If I look at your measurements, on the WAN port (KPN?) you’re not even getting 940Mbps as you should on fiber. It’s also not clear if you’re using the KPN hardware or your own. So this first needs to be investigated with the single ONT, KPN router (Box 12?) and a single PC connected to port 1. Then do a simple speedtest and see if it reaches the 940Mbps consistently.

​@rvk01 I undersand your suggestion of the investigation path, and that has been mine for a long time, however moving away from the experia box was what brought *some* stability to the connection.

The experience was roughly this:

• Restarting the Experia Box whenever I had an issue
• Restart the ONT when that didn’t work
  • This is way more rare to happen, but I would say more than I would expect to
• Get a 5G router and KPN 5G (which is metered on a daily limit but should be fine if it’s just a backup)
  • It didn’t suffice, I’d run over constantly because of the many and long unstable moments the link had
• Realize the 5G was sustaining 40-60% packet loss
• Moving away from the Experia Box to make a direct OpnSense conection with the ONT VLAN
  • This essetially eliminated the problem with restarting the router, it’s a 4-core/16GB RAM machine instead of the experia hardware
• Hiring Odido’s Klik’n’Klaar as a backup link (realizing the packet loss was gone and stability of speed was higher)
• Measuring with Grafana/InfluxDB the performance of both links from a dedicated machine
• Realizing I have roughly daily outages around 4-6am 
• Questioning my life choices…

The amount of infrastructure fiddling was just growing because I could neither get a proper link working with relatively constant speeds around the hired plan nor be able to have support follow up on the instabilities (given the internet being up at the time of contact is enough to dismiss an outage)

As you can see the measurements and procedures are not coming from lack of knowledge (at least until now, I can always be missing a variable) but I’m really unhappy with both the hardware provided (the experia box requiring me to reboot every now and again) and the link quality (even bypassing most of the overhead from the router)

I would say my backup link has been probably more reliable than the main one

You can observe the constant dips on WAN (KPN) happen just as ofter or more than a 5G link.

Also switching to Experia (and having to restart the box over and over) will be a degradation of the service now (since I can’t have 2 ppoe flows over the same ONT) until we discover what might be going on with the link.

I understand if you have problems with the Experia hardware, that you moved away from it. But fact remains there are only few routers/hardware which can handle speed with PPPoE on the WAN side (which is needed for KPN).

So… even if the Experia box gave you instability… what was actually the maximum (or usual) speed you could get out of your 1Gbps line?

Even if KPN wanted to diagnose any line problems… the Experia box would need to be connected (because they can only diagnose with that hardware).

> I understand if you have problems with the Experia hardware, that you moved away from it. But fact remains there are only few routers/hardware which can handle speed with PPPoE on the WAN side (which is needed for KPN).

This is why I mentioned I have a 4-core / 16 GB / 4x 2.5gbps ethernet ports dedicated box for the router, which I assume is more than what the Experia box has…

> So… even if the Experia box gave you instability… what was actually the maximum (or usual) speed you could get out of your 1Gbps line?

To be honest while the internet was stable I didn’t bother to measure since it was ok, but I’ve been through a ton of instability since then

> Even if KPN wanted to diagnose any line problems… the Experia box would need to be connected (because they can only diagnose with that hardware).

If we managed to get a proper test in depth I’d be more than willing to turn it on for a limited period, however the update is usually “The link looks just fine” just to be met with another outage a couple of hours or days later

No, because the Experia box is specially geared towards the PPPoE link.

Even though you have 4 cores… OpnSense can only use 1 single core because PPPoE can’t be spread over multiple cores.

It’s just a test for a few minutes… just to see if you have the correct speed on the line. I expect you do and that it is the OpnSense that can’t handle 1Gbps on that single core.

And if that’s the case, you might want to return to the Experia box and diagnose again what makes it unstable. Or use another router which can handle the speed with PPPoE.

Switched for the test, but I assume 2GHz cores should be enough for a 1Gbps link... I'll post the results once they're in

No, not necessarily. If it’s a really modern CPU you might just reach above 900Mbps but that’s not guaranteed (and only when completely optimized which it’s probably not).

https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=26162.0

https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=27049.15

I’ll keep the box up for a couple of days and take the optimizations into account for the comparison later… hopefully both give both results, with the Experia box and ONT collaborating for a good experience :p

Now that you have connected the Experia box again... there are two tests you can do…

1. Connect a PC with a good network card directly to the Experia box and do a speedtest.net (via clean browser or via the Windows app).

What is the global speed you reach now. 

2. Connect the OpnSense with the WAN to a LAN port of the Experia box. Preferably with the OpnSense on it's own subnet mask (so not the same as the Experia box. Connect the same PC to the LAN of OpnSense and do the test again.

What is the global speed you reach now. 

Possibly, because OpnSense doesn't have to do PPPoE now, it could reach higher. It's not a permanent solution because you don't want double NAT (NAT after NAT) but it will show what's going on and possibltly why the OpnSense doesn't get the full stable speed.

Since the main issue is instability, I’ll keep the monitoring for a couple of days, reaching 900 on a single test means nothing if the internet is down daily from 4-6am (which is my main complaint)

It will confirm that your own hardware isn't strong enough to handle the speed via PPPoE. But ok. After that you would still need to deal with the possible instability on the Expedia box.

At least with the Experia box connected, KPN could do measurements and look at the issue (which isn't possible with other hardware).

Hi ​@hcassus and welcome to our KPN Community. I'm glad to see you’ve gotten some help already and curious about the results of the tests with the Experia Box after a few days. Do keep us posted! 

I have just switched back to the direct link so we can compare the performance, so far the results look promissing regarding stability