I’ve purchased a new Vigor 2862Vac to be the main wireless and router at my house. I used to use a Fritz!Box 7390 and loved the ease of use combined with the technical power of the combined modem, router, firewall, VoIP and DECT base station. But things are getting older and with new VDSL/2 capabilities I have swapped from a cable connection to a fibre-to-the-cabinet through another provider, Andrews and Arnold. They are stupendously great, and techies all the way. Don’t expect any hand-holding.

But I’m starting to see some external wierdness after installing this new router. I have enabled ICMP from the WAN (ie. , being able to be pinged from the Internet) as I run an external monitor to test my broadband access from outside the home. This works using a Firebrick device that can sustain many thousands of ping requests per second and attempts to access my public internet address once per minute, then graphs the results.

The graph is showing some strange latency spikes:

Although I haven’t noticed any particular instances of slowdowns locally, this is a little worrying as my graph was nice and clean before, and those yellow spikes are a little regular to me … in fact, too regular at 30 minute intervals every couple of hours.

So a little digging – I run a Vigor 130 modem on the front-end that does the VDSL dialling and syncing. This is great, as I can then take the signal via Ethernet connection into whatever I like: a switch, my own router, pfSense running on a PC, or a commercial AP/firewall such as the Vigor 2862Vac. What does cause an issue is that the Vigor 130 runs on its own IP address range, and once it passes the connection to the router it is no longer accessible. I need to access it to see if the spikes are coming from it or the router.