[Noisebridge-discuss] general question about wifi and packet loss

[Ryan Castellucci]

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 10:31 AM, John Magolske<listmail at b79.net> wrote:
> At a café I find an audio stream keeps dropping off. Wondering about
> the quality of the net connection, I used the mtr command and am
> trying to make sense of it's output (pasted below). Does this mean
> packets are being dropped at every hop, all the way back to Google?
>
> Some days at this café most everything in the "Loss%" column is right
> around 0% (and net radio streams fine), other days it's all in the
> 30-40% range or higher. Could it be a poor connection here at the
> café? Too many users streaming high bandwidth video? Or just the
> variable quality of Comcast?

That's clearly an issue with the Wifi.  The loss starts at DD-WRT,
which is the wireless router.  If it were comcast the first couple
hops would be no/low loss.  That's probably either poor signal,
interference or WAY too many users.

The loss reading shows loss UP TO that hop.  So loss at hop 5 could be
happening at any previous hop.  Traceroute loss/latency statistics
really do require some interpretation and educated guessing to figure
out what's going on.

-- 
Ryan Castellucci http://ryanc.org/