Nova Broadband - Contention?

9726_9726

amber2 wrote: »

We were on the 20mb package And when I complained they switched us
To the 50mb package on a 12 month contract, located in North Cork.

Hey guys, try doing a traceroute inbound to your public IP to get another perspective on where the congestion or interference is. (BTW, either would cause failed frames and thus packets and would look very much the same, even down to the evening bias).

Go to www.whatismyip.com and do a web based traceroute (looking glass) from a Dublin or London server inbound to your IP.

FFS don't publish your IP here!

Also, for goodness sake, stop posting WiFi speed tests. They are completely unscientific and useless.

m99T

9726_9726 wrote: »

Hey guys, try doing a traceroute inbound to your public IP to get another perspective on where the congestion or interference is. (BTW, either would cause failed frames and thus packets and would look very much the same, even down to the evening bias).

Go to www.whatismyip.com and do a web based traceroute (looking glass) from a Dublin or London server inbound to your IP.

FFS don't publish your IP here!

Also, for goodness sake, stop posting WiFi speed tests. They are completely unscientific and useless.

IP's are public information and should always be treated as such, just saying. Obscurity != security.

BArra

IE Server:

#1

traceroute to 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 gi0-7-1-19.224.rcr21.dub01.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.254.169) 0.772 ms 0.794 ms
2 be2531.rcr11.b020477-1.dub01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.38.22) 1.120 ms 1.244 ms
3 149.6.4.82 (149.6.4.82) 1.371 ms 3.674 ms
4 78.137.186.71 (78.137.186.71) 5.566 ms 5.571 ms
5 78.137.157.142 (78.137.157.142) 5.567 ms 5.722 ms
6 91.103.0.195 (91.103.0.195) 12.059 ms 12.064 ms
7 91.103.0.131 (91.103.0.131) 12.056 ms 12.035 ms
8 91.103.0.70 (91.103.0.70) 5.820 ms 5.800 ms
9 10ge-01.rtr07.cix.core.novanetworks.ie (91.142.110.66) 5.912 ms 5.775 ms
10 xe-1.rtr01-nsc.novanetworks.ie (91.142.111.198) 6.058 ms 6.058 ms
11 xe-2.rtr01-cgt.gemini.core.novanetworks.ie (91.142.110.238) 6.762 ms 6.557 ms
12 xe-1.rtr01-rch.gemini.core.novanetworks.ie (91.142.111.46) 7.136 ms 7.614 ms
13 ***** 152.268 ms 151.568 ms

#2

traceroute to , 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 gi0-7-1-19.224.rcr21.dub01.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.254.169) 0.770 ms 0.781 ms
2 be2531.rcr11.b020477-1.dub01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.38.22) 1.177 ms 1.301 ms
3 149.6.4.82 (149.6.4.82) 5.431 ms 7.732 ms
4 78.137.186.71 (78.137.186.71) 5.595 ms 5.602 ms
5 78.137.157.142 (78.137.157.142) 5.612 ms 5.619 ms
6 91.103.0.195 (91.103.0.195) 11.864 ms 12.053 ms
7 91.103.0.131 (91.103.0.131) 12.045 ms 12.056 ms
8 91.103.0.70 (91.103.0.70) 5.869 ms 5.846 ms
9 10ge-01.rtr07.cix.core.novanetworks.ie (91.142.110.66) 5.813 ms 5.783 ms
10 xe-1.rtr01-nsc.novanetworks.ie (91.142.111.198) 6.105 ms 6.100 ms
11 xe-2.rtr01-cgt.gemini.core.novanetworks.ie (91.142.110.238) 6.684 ms 6.688 ms
12 xe-1.rtr01-rch.gemini.core.novanetworks.ie (91.142.111.46) 7.450 ms 7.456 ms
13 **** 368.109 ms 368.134 ms

GB Server:

#1

traceroute to , 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 gi0-0-1-15.7.nr12.b025687-0.lon13.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.254.57) 0.726 ms 0.758 ms
2 te0-0-1-0.agr12.lon13.atlas.cogentco.com (154.25.4.173) 0.828 ms 0.940 ms
3 te0-0-0-3.ccr41.lon13.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.39.97) 0.931 ms 0.935 ms
4 be3487.ccr51.lhr01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.60.6) 1.495 ms be3488.ccr52.lhr01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.60.14) 1.476 ms
5 be2527.rcr21.dub01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.37.246) 10.470 ms be2526.rcr21.dub01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.39.14) 10.676 ms
6 be2531.rcr11.b020477-1.dub01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.38.22) 11.057 ms 13.339 ms
7 149.6.4.82 (149.6.4.82) 11.113 ms 11.180 ms
8 78.137.186.71 (78.137.186.71) 15.441 ms 15.455 ms
9 78.137.157.142 (78.137.157.142) 15.559 ms 15.565 ms
10 91.103.0.195 (91.103.0.195) 12.037 ms 12.013 ms
11 91.103.0.131 (91.103.0.131) 11.974 ms 11.939 ms
12 91.103.0.70 (91.103.0.70) 15.603 ms 15.619 ms
13 10ge-01.rtr07.cix.core.novanetworks.ie (91.142.110.66) 62.283 ms 62.295 ms
14 xe-1.rtr01-nsc.novanetworks.ie (91.142.111.198) 62.760 ms 61.898 ms
15 xe-2.rtr01-cgt.gemini.core.novanetworks.ie (91.142.110.238) 63.583 ms 63.558 ms
16 xe-1.rtr01-rch.gemini.core.novanetworks.ie (91.142.111.46) 65.064 ms 65.040 ms
17 *** 82.479 ms 81.703 ms

#2

traceroute to , 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 gi0-0-1-15.7.nr12.b025687-0.lon13.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.254.57) 0.855 ms 1.033 ms
2 te0-0-1-0.agr12.lon13.atlas.cogentco.com (154.25.4.173) 0.852 ms te0-0-1-0.agr11.lon13.atlas.cogentco.com (154.25.4.169) 0.828 ms
3 te0-19-0-3.ccr41.lon13.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.38.49) 0.781 ms 0.804 ms
4 be3487.ccr51.lhr01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.60.6) 1.803 ms 1.807 ms
5 be2527.rcr21.dub01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.37.246) 10.669 ms 10.644 ms
6 be2531.rcr11.b020477-1.dub01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.38.22) 11.306 ms 13.736 ms
7 149.6.4.82 (149.6.4.82) 11.047 ms 11.098 ms
8 78.137.186.71 (78.137.186.71) 15.448 ms 15.458 ms
9 78.137.157.142 (78.137.157.142) 15.430 ms 15.427 ms
10 91.103.0.195 (91.103.0.195) 11.901 ms 11.894 ms
11 91.103.0.131 (91.103.0.131) 11.865 ms 11.936 ms
12 91.103.0.70 (91.103.0.70) 15.623 ms 15.627 ms
13 10ge-01.rtr07.cix.core.novanetworks.ie (91.142.110.66) 71.759 ms 71.734 ms
14 xe-1.rtr01-nsc.novanetworks.ie (91.142.111.198) 72.239 ms 72.246 ms
15 xe-2.rtr01-cgt.gemini.core.novanetworks.ie (91.142.110.238) 72.396 ms 72.401 ms
16 xe-1.rtr01-rch.gemini.core.novanetworks.ie (91.142.111.46) 75.057 ms 75.033 ms
17 **** 128.934 ms 128.931 ms

john.cashman

BArra wrote: »

what speed package are you on and which mast are you connected to?

if you wouldn't mind giving Speedtest results in the evening it would be much appreciated

(I'm connected to Rochestown on supernova 50Mb/10Mb, but real world up to 30Mb before 7pm)

I am on the Rochestown mast as well and have similar issues. Around evening times everything slowdown until midnight.

BigDogBig

Has anyone on Nova had any success in getting a better more consistent speed from them?

I'm in Churchtown Co Cork and am seeing similar issues with speeds. Running 1-3 average during the day 10am - 10pm. Picks up after that and can hit 25+ after midnight.

Very frustrating as you can imagine.

The support process is a joke and just fob you off claiming that they can see speeds of 17 all day hitting the dish on my roof.

Thanks

heavydawson

BigDogBig wrote: »

Has anyone on Nova had any success in getting a better more consistent speed from them?

I'm in Churchtown Co Cork and am seeing similar issues with speeds. Running 1-3 average during the day 10am - 10pm. Picks up after that and can hit 25+ after midnight.

Very frustrating as you can imagine.

The support process is a joke and just fob you off claiming that they can see speeds of 17 all day hitting the dish on my roof.

Thanks

The speed varies for me hour to hour, today I saw 50Mbps this morning around 9am, but yesterday it was 3-6Mbps in the evening. FWIW I don't expect consistency. The behaviour we're seeing right now is not something the operators could have factored into their models (I'm assuming they don't allocate enough bandwidth so that everyone can access the full 50Mbps 100% of the time). I don't know about the radio links to know if they're part of the problem, but I can imagine their backhaul and core infrastructure is probably straining.

stephen.dunne

m99T wrote: »

IP's are public information and should always be treated as such, just saying. Obscurity != security.

And probably dynamic or GCNAT anyhow.. Statics are a rarity nowadays

JabbaTheHut

I've had problems with them for nearly 3 weeks now. I do know that their network is probably under strain at the moment, but I am getting total disconnection to their network. I asked a question a few days ago on the wireless section of the broadband forum here, but didn't get any replies to it, so assumed I may be alone. Although, I did see a few people experiencing similar problems to me on Novas Facebook page.

I had contacted them more than a week ago with no reply. I gave them more than a week to send a follow up message as they said they were experiencing unprecedented levels of traffic at the moment. Today I got a call from them to say they made a small change to my router settings, and I'm now at more than 40mb speed. I tried straight away, and it was 18mb.
To be honest, it's never been better than 25 or 26, but all I really wanted was a solid connection, not one that dropped. By 9pm it was down to 0.89mb, with 17% packet loss.

I found this thread when I Googled "b-ras-pppoe.edge.novanetworks.ie". I'm forced to tether my phone to the PC over the last couple of weeks, and have pinged the preceding ip (91.142.110.9) from it to see where the problem may lie. (The next hop just returns Request timed out.)

However, at this time of the night, the network is OK. I'm getting 1% packet loss to Googles DNS server. While not gospel, Speedtest gives me about 8mb. So I'll have to wait until tomorrow evening to try again.

ussjtrunks

I usually get the full 50mb on Nova almost all the time but since the lockdown I get a max of 25mb, tonight it was really bad though had like 2mb since 8pm

aFlabbyPanda

I'm Airwave and was having similar issues. Nova claim they can provide between 25 & 50 Mbps even with the extra load due to Covid restrictions. Despite having opened tickets with Airwave now for 10 days they refuse to admit there is a problem or what could be causing my slow speed! Very frustrating trying to work from home.

heavydawson

Just wanted to leave a small positive note about Nova. Their Tipperary/Kilkenny infrastructure hit some issues yesterday, and our connection went down. I checked novastatus.net and nothing had been reported, so I fired them off a quick support ticket from their website. I got an actual voice call back from them within 20 minutes letting me know exactly what the problem was. Not a robo-caller, but a proper human being.
When NBI hits my area in however many years, I hope Nova end up as a reseller.

JabbaTheHut

In fairness to them, when there's a problem like that, they update their novastatus.net page fairly quickly.

Unfortunately for me, I've been getting frequent disconnections for the past 2 months or so. I've contacted them, and they did contact me after about 10 days to say the changed some settings on my Ubiquiti router on the roof. Made no difference. The lack of others complaining leads me to believe it's a problem on my end, and I'm trying to sort out where.

ussjtrunks

Connection today unuseable been with um for the last 5 years always saw over 30mb till this coronavirus started. Still feel I should be getting more than this anyone else on Nova how are ye getting on?

JabbaTheHut

ussjtrunks wrote: »

Connection today unuseable been with um for the last 5 years always saw over 30mb till this coronavirus started. Still feel I should be getting more than this anyone else on Nova how are ye getting on?

As I've previously mentioned, I never got near 50meg, usually 20mb, and the Coronavirus hasn't really made much of a difference that way. But as per my last post, I get the connection dropped a good few times a day.

ussjtrunks

Atleast I’m not getting disconnected at any time, the morning seems to be worst hit for some reason rn I have around 10mb

z0oT

JabbaTheHut wrote: »

Unfortunately for me, I've been getting frequent disconnections for the past 2 months or so. I've contacted them, and they did contact me after about 10 days to say the changed some settings on my Ubiquiti router on the roof. Made no difference. The lack of others complaining leads me to believe it's a problem on my end, and I'm trying to sort out where.

I have a similar issue. We're with Nova in Tipperary since 2016 and the connection was wonderfully reliable up until mid-2019 when we would have got the speed bump up to their "Supernova" package.

Since then, periodically I get completely disconnected from their network. The router will lose the IP, attempt to re-connect and fail to do so.

It'll continue to fail until one or more of the following is done:

• Reboot the router
• Unplug the PoE connection to the Dish on the Roof and plug it in again
• Unplug the WAN ethernet cable and plug it in again

This might only happen once a week, or can happen daily. 99.9% of the time, http://novastatus.net shows no issue when this occurs. Their support has more or less thrown their hands in the air and said the problem is down to local interference in the area and there's nothing they can do about it. I do know other wireless ISPs have moved into the area since around the time we've started to have issues, so maybe it could be true, but I don't know anymore.

I also have a Static IP from them which is good. However, what is frustrating is that I can't use a Router other than the really low end TP-Link WR841N they provide with only 100Mbps LAN ports. I've tried 3 other routers (with Gigabit LAN ports) and while they connect just fine on the WAN and work for a while, they throw up a "WAN Cable is Unplugged/Disconnected" error that the WR841N doesn't. There must something seriously screwed up with whatever is inside that Dish on the roof.

I've honestly had enough of this with working from home and I'm only waiting to switch to another provider now. It's a shame given their connection used to be so reliable.

heavydawson

z0oT wrote: »

I have a similar issue. We're with Nova in Tipperary since 2016 and the connection was wonderfully reliable up until mid-2019 when we would have got the speed bump up to their "Supernova" package.

Since then, periodically I get completely disconnected from their network. The router will lose the IP, attempt to re-connect and fail to do so.

It'll continue to fail until one or more of the following is done:

• Reboot the router
• Unplug the PoE connection to the Dish on the Roof and plug it in again
• Unplug the WAN ethernet cable and plug it in again

This might only happen once a week, or can happen daily. 99.9% of the time, http://novastatus.net shows no issue when this occurs. Their support has more or less thrown their hands in the air and said the problem is down to local interference in the area and there's nothing they can do about it. I do know other wireless ISPs have moved into the area since around the time we've started to have issues, so maybe it could be true, but I don't know anymore.

I also have a Static IP from them which is good. However, what is frustrating is that I can't use a Router other than the really low end TP-Link WR841N they provide with only 100Mbps LAN ports. I've tried 3 other routers (with Gigabit LAN ports) and while they connect just fine on the WAN and work for a while, they throw up a "WAN Cable is Unplugged/Disconnected" error that the WR841N doesn't. There must something seriously screwed up with whatever is inside that Dish on the roof.

I've honestly had enough of this with working from home and I'm only waiting to switch to another provider now. It's a shame given their connection used to be so reliable.

That's an odd issue with the router! FWIW I've used a downstream router since I got Nova, first an ASUS RT-AC68U, now a Peplink Balance Two. I've never seen the WAN disconnection issues you mention.

JabbaTheHut

z0oT wrote: »

I have a similar issue. We're with Nova in Tipperary since 2016 and the connection was wonderfully reliable up until mid-2019 when we would have got the speed bump up to their "Supernova" package.

Since then, periodically I get completely disconnected from their network. The router will lose the IP, attempt to re-connect and fail to do so.

It'll continue to fail until one or more of the following is done:

• Reboot the router
• Unplug the PoE connection to the Dish on the Roof and plug it in again
• Unplug the WAN ethernet cable and plug it in again

This might only happen once a week, or can happen daily. 99.9% of the time, http://novastatus.net shows no issue when this occurs. Their support has more or less thrown their hands in the air and said the problem is down to local interference in the area and there's nothing they can do about it. I do know other wireless ISPs have moved into the area since around the time we've started to have issues, so maybe it could be true, but I don't know anymore.

I also have a Static IP from them which is good. However, what is frustrating is that I can't use a Router other than the really low end TP-Link WR841N they provide with only 100Mbps LAN ports. I've tried 3 other routers (with Gigabit LAN ports) and while they connect just fine on the WAN and work for a while, they throw up a "WAN Cable is Unplugged/Disconnected" error that the WR841N doesn't. There must something seriously screwed up with whatever is inside that Dish on the roof.

I've honestly had enough of this with working from home and I'm only waiting to switch to another provider now. It's a shame given their connection used to be so reliable.

Interestingly, we're in Tipp, with Nova from about mid 2016 too. It was pretty good, save for a month in 2017 when we suddenly started to go over the 20mb limit at the time. After a fair bit of wrangling with support, as quick as the problem appeared, it disappeared. I got an RT-N66U, put on TomatoUsb so I could see the usage. I had some intermittent problems over the years, but nothing like this.

I trialed Imagine last summer. It was great, but reading about other people experiences, and the fact Nova had just launched their Supernova service, I stayed with Nova.

Now, I will say, over the last few days, things have improved hugely. Packet loss has dropped to 0% over a few hours testing. I did send them an email with my results, so maybe they did something to change it.

z0oT

heavydawson wrote: »

That's an odd issue with the router! FWIW I've used a downstream router since I got Nova, first an ASUS RT-AC68U, now a Peplink Balance Two. I've never seen the WAN disconnection issues you mention.

I've tried a Tp-Link Archer C7 with its stock firmware, then with DD-WRT flashed on to it. I then tried an Asus RT-AC66U. All of them reported a complete disconnection on the WAN port after a few days or a week.

Back in the day on certain desktop motherboards, some Realtek ethernet NICs would do funny things when working at 1Gbps so I figured something like that could be going on. I even went away and crimped a CAT5e cable to connect only two of the four twisted pairs to force the connection to work at 100Mbps, and still I got the same issue with each of the aftermarket routers.

Thankfully though I've gotten around it by installing an OpenVPN server in a Virtual Machine on my Home Server rather than having it run on the router. It just means one more port forward which while not ideal, is fine.

JabbaTheHut wrote: »

Interestingly, we're in Tipp, with Nova from about mid 2016 too. It was pretty good, save for a month in 2017 when we suddenly started to go over the 20mb limit at the time. After a fair bit of wrangling with support, as quick as the problem appeared, it disappeared. I got an RT-N66U, put on TomatoUsb so I could see the usage. I had some intermittent problems over the years, but nothing like this.

I trialed Imagine last summer. It was great, but reading about other people experiences, and the fact Nova had just launched their Supernova service, I stayed with Nova.

Now, I will say, over the last few days, things have improved hugely. Packet loss has dropped to 0% over a few hours testing. I did send them an email with my results, so maybe they did something to change it.

In our case the connection is great when it works. I might not get the full 50Mbps, but usually I don't ever see under 15-20 even at peak times late in the evening.

I really don't mind a reduction in speed given the increased demand their network is under at the current time. I'd get by just fine with working from home on probably less than 5Mbps, but the disconnection issues are causing problems for me - I've been cut off in the middle of skype calls for work for instance.

I had another disconnection this morning according to the router logs at about 5.30am. A reboot of the router this morning and it's been online again since.

The disconnections happen about once per day max, and while annoying and completely ridiculous in 2020, it's manageable for the time being.

ussjtrunks

Disconnections should not be happening I have never had disconnections with Nova in 5+ years keep on to them it’s prob some interference near the tower

Alfagtamini

Tipp based aswell . With them since 2016. Overall it's been good ,but we lost connection on Wednesday afternoon and it didn't come back fully until Sunday afternoon.
Tech support didn't reply to the ticket I opened on Wednesday until yesterday which is very poor.

I get a email from my house alarm when it looses connection to the server. I will generally get this 5-6 times a week normally in the small hours of the morning.

I changed the supplied router to Google WiFi mesh system last year and it's working fine.

Average speed 29 down 3.6 up over the last month. (Google WiFi does a test every couple of days )

Overall a happy customer , just slightly disappointed how they handled the outage last week

JabbaTheHut

That's odd that it lasted until Sunday for you. Once I saw they posted an outage on Novastatus, I knew they would fix it at some stage. It was back next day, Thursday, for me. When you say fully back, what do you mean?

A+-Guru

I had this problem with another wireless service provider in the galway region, I will not mention names but I had the exact problem you did, and it turned out too many clients were on the mast, and the cpu was hitting 100% which was causing huge ping spikes, mine was like yours, upwards of 1000ms, they installed a new mast to offload some of the clients and the problem sorted, I got FTTH shortly after but I was many months in the situation you are in.

Alfagtamini

JabbaTheHut wrote: »

That's odd that it lasted until Sunday for you. Once I saw they posted an outage on Novastatus, I knew they would fix it at some stage. It was back next day, Thursday, for me. When you say fully back, what do you mean?

It was up and down like a yo-yo from Thursday afternoon until Sunday.
when it was working we were getting 0.4mps and pings of over 300ms and high packet loss. We weren't the only ones , neighbour had the same

JabbaTheHut

paulryanmini wrote: »

It was up and down like a yo-yo from Thursday afternoon until Sunday.
when it was working we were getting 0.4mps and pings of over 300ms and high packet loss. We weren't the only ones , neighbour had the same

That's odd. Was the same as it was before the outage here. But, interestingly enough, since the weekend or so, the packet loss is almost perfect. Maybe it was like A+-Guru said, and they made some changes to their hardware.

Alfagtamini

JabbaTheHut wrote: »

That's odd. Was the same as it was before the outage here. But, interestingly enough, since the weekend or so, the packet loss is almost perfect. Maybe it was like A+-Guru said, and they made some changes to their hardware.

Fingers crossed. As I said up until last week I couldn't really fault them. Very reliable and consistent speeds.
100 times better than the other fixed wireless providers in the area.