Fios Severe Packet Loss with customer.alter.net

[watchword]

I'm experiencing intermittent disconnects when playing online games. I ran a mtr (linux traceroute utility) against some websites and I am noticing severe packet loss on one of the hops. Specifically the hop to customer.alter.net. From my research, it seems this is a verizon owned hop.

[Cang_Household · Accepted solution]

The traceroute results are NOT useful in diagnosing intermittent connectivity issues.

customer.alter.net is an ASBR. ASBR are busy and responding with ICMP Type 11 is not a priority.

Furthermore, your traceroute in fact shows 0% packet drop at the destination, which means  there is  no packet drop along the route, including at the ASBR.

[watchword]

I might have misinterpreted the output of MTR since it's possible there is some sort of ICMP rate limiting happening on the customer.alter.net side given that further hops are experiencing minimal packet loss. I am still confused as to why I'm experiencing sporadic / intermittent disconnects with games like counter strike 2.

[watchword]

when I run MTR with -T (TCP mode), I still experience packet loss on the customer.alter.net hop (~16%)

[watchword]

Just in case, I tried using a different device / OS than the above examples (previous examples were on a Desktop ethernet connection using Linux, the below example is using a MacBook wifi on MacOS):

There is similar packet loss occurring, even with TCP mode in mar

[Cang_Household · Accepted solution]

The traceroute results are NOT useful in diagnosing intermittent connectivity issues.

customer.alter.net is an ASBR. ASBR are busy and responding with ICMP Type 11 is not a priority.

Furthermore, your traceroute in fact shows 0% packet drop at the destination, which means  there is  no packet drop along the route, including at the ASBR.

[watchword]

Hi Cang_Household, thanks for replying to me. I'm running mtr with TCP mode which doesn't use ICMP. Do you have suggestions for how to debug intermittent connectivity issues?

[Cang_Household · Accepted solution]

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@watchword wrote:

I'm running mtr with TCP mode which doesn't use ICMP. 

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That's NOT  true. The man pages for mtr only says TCP mode does not use ICMP Type 8, and it says it deliberately sets a low TTL, which triggers ICMP Type 11 message to come back from the router.

Please do a WireShark capture when you are running the mtr and look for the ICMP Type 11 message.