Version 3.0 - 15 March 2007. Thanks to Saturday for working with me on this and his excellent contribution.
Admin edit: please note that detailed stats are only viewable using the methods discussed in the thread if you have a white Netgear V1 router. For the newer V2 routers, (Netgear and Sagem) the only stats viewable are the simple stats.
Posting Stats
Please don't just post stats and ask for a comment, or post "are my stats any good", or "what do my stats mean" and so on because you may get no response. Instead, please do the following:- Take a look at Saturday's excellent description of router stats: Sky router stats (speed, noise, attenuation) explained
- Also take a look at his "Interpreting line errors" section at the bottom of this post.
- Use the search facility to see if the same question has been asked. Chances are, it already has - and been answered.
- Failing all that, post your stats here, but please include the following information when posting stats:
- What broadband package are you on? (We can't rely on signatures!)
- A detailed description of the problem that you have that has lead you to obtain your router stats in the first place.
- A description of what you have done to try to resolve the problem.
- Whether the problem is new or has always been there since joining Sky. If it is new, what changes have there been?
- An overview of the wiring in the house and where, in the wiring scheme, the router is plugged when obtaining the stats.
- How far are you from the telephone exchange? I use this to find out but there are others. DSL ZoneUK - Distance to exchange.
- One final plea for your understanding: Unless requested, please don't PM your stats to a forum moderator. You're less likely to get a reply, it certainly won't be faster than posting here and not everyone would benefit from the analysis. I'm sure you understand.
Overview
"How do I get my router stats?" is one of the most commonly asked questions on these forums. Reasons for asking it include:
- Idle (or non-idle) curiosity!
- You've been asked, in response to one of your questions, to "post your stats".
- You have a problem such as slow speed, capped speed and so on and you want to investigate further.
Note that this post does not explain how to
interpret the stats, just how to obtain them. A quick way to interpreting them is to post them here and ask politely for someone to interpret them for you! If you are lucky, one of the "techies" will take pity and go through them. The other way is to do what the techies had to do themselves once upon a time: do plenty of background reading and try to work out what they mean for yourself.
PLEASE do not simply obtain the stats and then post them with no objective in mind. See at the bottom for what information to provide when posting stats.
There is more than one answer to the question of how to obtain the stats because, there is more than one kind of "stats" that you can get. However, in general, the stats fall into one of two types:
- Simple stats. If someone asks what your stats are, this is where I'd start.
- Detailed stats. If someone asked what your detailed stats are, I'd start here.
NOTE: All the instructions assume that your router IP address is still the default of 192.168.0.1 and that the user name / password for the web admin login is admin / sky.
Simple Stats
These can be obtained from the router very simply, but the information that they give is limited.
- Log into the web admin by pointing your web browser at the router (192.168.0.1)
- Enter the user name and password to go in.
- The main page shows some useful information such as connection speed.
- Click on the "Show Statistics" button slightly for more detailed information such as SNR.
Detailed Stats Tools
To obtain detailed stats, you need a third party tool. There are two that are commonly used and each has its pros and cons for obtaining the stats. (You'll forgive me if I list my own app first.
)
Bounce Sky Router
Pros
- Once installed, the stats are a single mouse click away.
- It does much more than providing stats. In fact, it was designed to monitor the router's connection and reboot it if necessary.
Cons
- It is a piece of software that has to be installed.
- It requires the Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0 and therefore only runs on Windows.
Mognut’s Utility
Pros
- All the code is in a web page, so it requires no software installation and therefore runs on "any" OS.
- It can do much more than provide router stats.
Cons
- Obtaining the stats is actually quite a few mouse clicks, back buttons and manually opening of files.
- It only runs one-off commands that are lost after a router reboot.
- There's no continuous monitoring.
My advice is:
- If you don't have Windows (or Pre-2000), use Mognut's, because you have to!
- If you have no requirement for any continuous monitoring and just want a one-off stats "snapshot", use Mognut’s.
- If you are happy to install a small app and want the stats to be as easy to show (in Notepad) as possible, use Bounce Sky Router.
- If you want the continuous connection monitoring, use Bounce Sky Router.
Obtaining Detailed Stats
Bounce Sky Router- See this thread for the download location: New monitor tool to reboot router automatically.
- Download, install and run Bounce Sky Router.
- Right-click on the system tray icon and select “Display Detailed Stats”.
Mognut’s Utility- Go to the utility web site: Sky Netgear DG834GT utility version 0.3.
- Click the “Get” detailed modem stats button and click “OK”.
- Enter the router login user name and password.
- At the next screen, click the back button on your browser.
- Click the “Download” netgear.cfg button.
- What you do next depends on your operating system. On Windows XP, click the “Save” button to save the file to your hard disk. (If you click “Open”, you may find that the file association is one that doesn’t handle carriage returns the same way as the router, hence the reason for saying “Save”.)
- Open the file in WordPad (not notepad).
Interpreting line errors
CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check).
Data is transmitted as streams of packets through a network. A TCP module at the far end sends back an acknowledgement for packets which have been successfully received. It checks for damaged bytes by using a checksum. In simple terms, if any packets fail the check they will be recorded as CRC errors.
The number of CRC errors recorded must be looked at in relation to the total number of packets transmitted and the superframe figure (SF) can be used in the absence of a packet count.
There is no standard formula which would indicate whether a given level of CRC is acceptable or unacceptable. A useful "rule of thumb" is that the number of CRCs should be less than 0.1% of the superframe count. A bit more than this (2x or 5x) is probably going to be fine, a lot higher (10x or 100x) probably won't be.
In any event CRC must not be looked at in isolation; it is quite possible for instance to have a "low" level of CRC but a high level of errored seconds/loss of signal and vice versa.
LOS (Loss of signal)
This sounds bad but a handfull of these in any 15 minute period will probably go unnoticed in normal surfing/downloading. It's showing that connection to the exchange was lost momentarily but the connection will cope with this. A high level however, say more than 5% of the CRCs, indicates a fairly severe line problem, possibly noise spiking.
ES (Errored Seconds)
An Errored Second is a second in which one or more coding violations occurred OR one or more loss of signal defects occurred.
Again, as with CRC there is no standard formula which would indicate whether a given level of ES is acceptable or unacceptable. Anything other than a near perfect line will give some level of ES error. Look at the 15 minute periods. There are 900 seconds in 15 minutes. An errored second figure of up to 5 or 10 is probably manageable. On really bad lines the ES number can actually equal the total seconds i.e. every second of connection experienced a coding violation or loss of signal.
In many ways, errored seconds are a better indicator of a line that is struggling than CRC. Severely errored seconds give an additional quantification.
SES (Severely Errored Seconds)
As the name suggests, a severely errored second is worse than an errored second. To be counted as errored only one event needs to occur. A severely errored second quantifies this. Typically a severely errored second is one where a threshold number of events is passed. Each router manufacturer will set their own threshold for what constitutes a severely errored second.
One last thing. A caveat on the above:
Interpretation is down to subjective evaluation - you can't simply say "this is good - that's bad". The whole picture must be looked at.
When looking at the stats, particular attention must be paid to the noise margin levels during the stat measurement period. For example, if the noise margin had dropped down to less than 6db then even the best quality line would record errors. Similarly, if the noise margin had been boosted up so it was always above say 9db and the line showed errors, then the "real" error level will have been under reported.
Different consideration must be given to capped lines e.g. if comparing two lines both reporting similar error levels, where one is capped and one not, the capped line has a much bigger problem.
Final note: I'll sticky this and allow replies and soup up the instructions as necessary based on the comments.
15-03-07, 02:15 PM
