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Hub 3 / Compal CH7465-LG (TG2492LG) and CGNV4 Latency Cause

Datalink
Up to speed

Good Day Ladies and Gentlemen,

Greetings from the other side of the pond, so to speak.  Over the last few weeks I've been perusing various user forums across North America and Europe for issues related to Intel Puma 6 modem latency.  Of those forums, your Hub 3 stands out as yet another Puma 6 based modem where users see continuous latency no matter what site is used or what online game is played. Considering all of the problems that are on the go, the following information should be of interest to all Hub 3, Compal CH7465-LG and Hitron CGNV4 modem users.  There is much more to post regarding this, so this is a start, to alert VM users as to the real cause of the latency and hopefully engage the VM engineering staff, via the forum staff, with Arris.  I am surprised to see that there has been no mention on this board of users from other ISPs who are suffering the exact same issues with their modems, so, this may come as a surprise to some, and possibly old news to others.

So, the short story ........

The Hub 3 / Compal CH7465-LG (TG2492LG) & Hiton CGNV4 modems are Intel Puma 6 / 6 Media Gateway (MG) based modems.  These modems exhibit high latency to the modem and high latency thru the modem.  The latency affects all IPV4 and IPV6 protocols, so it will be seen on every internet application and game.  The basic cause is the processing of the data packets thru a CPU software based process instead of thru the hardware processor / accelerator.  It appears that a higher priority task runs periodically, causing the packet processing to halt, and then resume.  This is observed as latency in applications and in ping tests to the modem and beyond.  For the last several weeks, Hitron, along with Intel and Rogers Communications in Canada have been addressing the latency issue within the Hitron CGNxxx series modems.  To date, only the IPV4 ICMP latency has been resolved.  Although this is only one protocol, it does show that a Puma 6MG modem is capable of using the hardware processor / accelerator with good results.  Currently Rogers is waiting for further firmware updates from Hitron which should include an expanded list of resolved protocol latency issues.  For Arris modems, "Netdog" an Arris engineer indicated last week that Arris was onboard to address the issue for the Arris SB6190 modem.  That should be considered as good news for any Arris modem (read Hub 3) user as Arris should be able to port those changes over to other Puma 6/6MG modems fairly quickly.  This is not a trivial exercise and will probably take several weeks to accomplish.  Note that there is no guarantee at this point that it is possible to shift all packet processing to the hardware processor / accelerator without suffering from any packet loss side effects.  Time will tell if all of the technical issues can be resolved with the current hardware included in the Puma 6/6MG chipset.  Last night, Netdog loaded beta firmware on selected test modems on the Comcast Communications network.  As this was only done last night, it's too soon to tell what this version resolves and if it was successful or not.  Netdog has contacts with staff at Comcast, Rogers, Charter and Cox Communications to fan out beta versions and modifications for testing.  I'd say its time to add Virgin Media and/or Liberty Global to that group as well.

Recent activity:

Approx three weeks ago a DSLReports user, xymox1 started a thread where he reported high latency to an Arris SB6190 and illustrated that with numerous MultiPing plots.  This is the same latency that I and other users with Rogers communications have been dealing with for months so it came as no surprise.  As well as reporting via that thread, xymox1 took it upon himself to email several staff members at Arris, Intel, Cablelabs and others.  The result of that campaign was Netdog's announcement, last week, that Arris was fully engaged at resolving the issue.  That has led to last nights release of beta firmware, although as I indicated its too early to determine what the beta firmware resolves, if anything.


The original thread that xymox1 started is here:

https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r31079834-ALL-SB6190-is-a-terrible-modem-Intel-Puma-6-MaxLinear-mis...


Yesterday, DSLReports issued a news story covering the thread:

https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/The-Arris-SB6190-Modem-Puma-6-Chipset-Have-Some-Major-Issues-138...


Today, Arris responded:

https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Arris-Tells-us-Its-Working-With-Intel-on-SB6190-Puma6-Problems-1...


That response was also picked by Multichannel.com

http://www.multichannel.com/news/distribution/intel-arris-working-firmware-fix-sb6190-modem/409379

This is more news likely to appear in the next few days as additional tech and news staff pick up on this issue.


Hub 3 observations:

Like many others using a Puma 6/6MG modem, Hub 3 users are experiencing latency when they ping the modem, or ping a target outside of the home, game online or use low latency applications.  The common misconception is that this is Buffer Bloat. It's not. Its most likely a case of the packet processing stopping while the CPU processes a higher priority task.  The packet processing is done via the CPU no matter what mode the modem is operating in, modem mode or router mode and no matter what IPV4 or IPV6 protocol is used.  Normally, the latency is just that, latency.  The exception are UDP packets. In this case there is latency and packet loss.  The result of that is delayed and failed DNS lookups, and poor game performance for games that use UDP for player/server comms or player/player comms.


Can this be fixed?

So far, it appears that the answer is yes.  Rogers Communications issued beta firmware to a small group of test modems in October.  This version shifted the IPV4 ICMP processing from the CPU to the hardware processor / accelerator, resulting in greatly improved performance in ping latency.  At the present time we are waiting for the next version firmware which should shift other protocols over to the hardware processor / accelerator.  That can be seen in the following post:

http://communityforums.rogers.com/t5/forums/forumtopicpage/board-id/Getting_connected/message-id/369...

The details and results of last nights beta release to the Comcast group have yet to be seen.

At this point there is enough reading to keep most staff and users busy.  My intention is to post some of the history leading up to this point and instructions on how to detect the latency and packet loss.  This is not thru the use of a BQM.  I had hoped to post this all at once but events are moving much faster than I had thought they would.  For now this should suffice to get the ball rolling.

Below is a link to a post with a couple of HrPing plots from my 32 channel modem to the connected CMTS.  This shows the latency that is observed and reflects what others have posted in this forum using Pingplotter and HrPing.

https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r31106550-

HrPing is one of the freebie applications that can be used to monitor the latency to and thru the modem. 

Pingplots with Pingplotter which show the latency from my modem to the CMTS can be found in the first two to three rows of my online image library at Rogers Communications, located below.  They are essentially what the BQM would look like if you were able to zoom into the plot to the point where you could see the individual ping spikes.  Those ping spikes are common to Puma 6 and Puma 6MG modems.

http://communityforums.rogers.com/t5/media/gallerypage/user-id/829158

 

 

 [MOD EDIT: Subject heading changed to assist community]

4,478 REPLIES 4,478


@Sephiroth wrote:
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2008:162:0020:0026:EN:PDF
... contains the definition of "terminal equipment" as applied to the piece of EU law referred to in the ISp Review article. The law can be found at:
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32015R2120

And yes, "terminal equipment" means the kit that connects you to the Internet. Wonderful.



I'm not a lawyer but, the first article does state a couple of important things, firstly it states that "Member States shall ensure that economic operators have the right to import, market, connect, bring into service and maintain terminal equipment." in this instance VM would be the "economic operator" so they have the right to do these things and it also very specifically states further on "Public telecommunications network" the VM network isn't a "public" network its privately owned, privately operated and privately funded, in this case it would sound very much like this clause wouldn't even apply to VM with it being a private network they are free to impose restrictions on what can or cannot connect to their private network, considering this legislation dates back to atleast 2015 and one of the earlier articles it links to goes back to 2008, so this is hardly "new" and if it actually applied then it would have been brought up a long time ago

By public network it means a network that members of the public can access, as opposed to a private network such as a business intranet. It is not referring to publicly or privately owned.

eg. "To enable users to have access to the terminal equipment of their choice, it is necessary to know and make transparent the characteristics of the interface points of the public network to which the terminal equipment is to be connected."

WhyLieToUs
On our wavelength

@nallar wrote:

Congratulations to WhyLieToUs for escaping from the bounds of this forum thread.

this should not happenthis should not happen


This DOES happen when you are using a POS SH3 😞

Just had a major issue with the SH3 (firmware version BA3), had no internet so did a soft reset via the web interface followed by 3 or 4 hard resets.  Zero internet following each restart and the latency was through the roof so I had no option but to factory reset using the pin hole on the back of the SH3.

Anyway, 30 mins later I'm back online and now on firmware version 603, it's instantly noticeable the improvement, and webpages open so much faster.  I've not tried any online gaming as of yet so I'm unable to report on any improvements there.

Kids are streaming YouTube via the V6, I'm using Plex streaming 4K content wirelessly and wife is using the slingbox to watch something on her iPad so not a great time to run a test...

25ms : x
26ms : xxx
27ms : xxxx
28ms : xxxxxxxxxx
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30ms : xxxxxxxx
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47ms : xxx
48ms : xxx
49ms : x
50ms : x
51ms : xx
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53ms : xxxxxxxxx
54ms : xxxxxxxx
55ms : xxxxxxxxxx
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65ms : x
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71ms : xxxx
72ms : x
79ms : x
80ms : x
82ms : x
87ms : x
100 - 149ms :x

Finished. Excess red is a concern if most measurements are 50ms or less.

That looks promising

Have a look a couple of pages back at my instructions for running an iperf3 test against a public server to measure jitter over UDP, which will give us a clearer picture 🙂


@philjohn wrote:

That looks promising

Have a look a couple of pages back at my instructions for running an iperf3 test against a public server to measure jitter over UDP, which will give us a clearer picture 🙂


All being well I will do this tonight, I need to get Entware back on my router and I'll run it.

--------------------------------------------------------
Look behind you, a three-headed monkey

HI all. Been upgraded from the Tivo box and Superhub 2ac to the V6 Box and Superhub 3 router as of mid February. We didn't even mean too, we called VM to get reduced package costs (Which was successful, went from £130 to £90 a month!) but they flogged us this new kit for free and boosted our broadband to 200mb. Wow, ever since we've upgraded gaming is IMPOSSIBLE. Literally. Constant lag every minute or so in the game lasting between 10-30 seconds, most of the time just completely kicking me/timing out. Its like this on all consoles. Streaming just constantly buffers too. Even doing the basics like browsing social media and the web on our phones, the wifi just crashes every minute or so for a few seconds.

This seems to be a problem for THOUSANDS of customers and from what I've read its a known problem with the router. What baffles me is the arrogance of VM, continuing to roll our poor equipment and being in completely denial that there is a problem and some people have had this for over a year it seems. 

Without reading through hundreds of pages and thousands of comments, does anyone have definitive info on when this will be fixed or able to give basic technical advice on how to fix this? Will using the 'Super'hub as a modem and buying a good router solve any problems?

Any advice appreciated.

Thanks all.


@SwindonGamer wrote:

HI all. Been upgraded from the Tivo box and Superhub 2ac to the V6 Box and Superhub 3 router as of mid February. We didn't even mean too, we called VM to get reduced package costs (Which was successful, went from £130 to £90 a month!) but they flogged us this new kit for free and boosted our broadband to 200mb. Wow, ever since we've upgraded gaming is IMPOSSIBLE. Literally. Constant lag every minute or so in the game lasting between 10-30 seconds, most of the time just completely kicking me/timing out. Its like this on all consoles. Streaming just constantly buffers too. Even doing the basics like browsing social media and the web on our phones, the wifi just crashes every minute or so for a few seconds.

This seems to be a problem for THOUSANDS of customers and from what I've read its a known problem with the router. What baffles me is the arrogance of VM, continuing to roll our poor equipment and being in completely denial that there is a problem and some people have had this for over a year it seems. 

Without reading through hundreds of pages and thousands of comments, does anyone have definitive info on when this will be fixed or able to give basic technical advice on how to fix this? Will using the 'Super'hub as a modem and buying a good router solve any problems?

Any advice appreciated.

Thanks all.


From your description it does not appear that you are experiencing issues associated with this thread. You should raise a separate thread to get an engineer out to sort out your problems.

It should also be noted that those experiencing SH3/Puma 6 issues and complaining on here number maybe in the hundreds, definitely not thousands. Statistical extrapolation of the number of complaints could possibly show the issues affecting thousands but it would not be valid to do so.

It would seem to me like your issue is moreso a problem with the Hub3 itself, the issue people are facing on here is lag spikes every 2 minutes or so, not issues buffering or with wifi dropping.