Help diagnosing absurd amounts of packet loss/dealing with a negligent IT department

[Evertrick]

My university has been suffering some serious connectivity issues since they messed around with the network last year to 'provide more bandwidth for the students.' Ever since then the internet's been incredibly shoddy, and online gaming became all but impossible.

I started running diagnostic tests, mostly through the netalyzer program developed at Berkeley, and discovered that more often than not our network is suffering from 20-30% packet loss, going up to 50% on some nights. I've brought this problem up with the campus IT department on multiple occasions, but each time they seem to not understand the magnitude of the issue, look into it for a couple days, then write it off and no changes are made.

I don't have a lot of personal experience fixing issues such as these so I haven't been able to suggest a fix, I've only been able to do my best to get them to understand the issue, but that doesn't seem to be enough. I would like to know if there are any common issues creating such high amounts of packet loss, and if there is anything I can suggest to the IT department on campus that might get them to do something about it.

TL;DR
University network consistently suffers from 20-30% packet loss at almost all hours of the day, looking for a potential cause for the problem and a possible fix.

Thanks!

 

[carnageX]

My university has been suffering some serious connectivity issues since they messed around with the network last year to 'provide more bandwidth for the students.' Ever since then the internet's been incredibly shoddy, and online gaming became all but impossible.

I started running diagnostic tests, mostly through the netalyzer program developed at Berkeley, and discovered that more often than not our network is suffering from 20-30% packet loss, going up to 50% on some nights. I've brought this problem up with the campus IT department on multiple occasions, but each time they seem to not understand the magnitude of the issue, look into it for a couple days, then write it off and no changes are made.

I don't have a lot of personal experience fixing issues such as these so I haven't been able to suggest a fix, I've only been able to do my best to get them to understand the issue, but that doesn't seem to be enough. I would like to know if there are any common issues creating such high amounts of packet loss, and if there is anything I can suggest to the IT department on campus that might get them to do something about it.

TL;DR
University network consistently suffers from 20-30% packet loss at almost all hours of the day, looking for a potential cause for the problem and a possible fix.

Thanks!

Coming from working for a University's IT department... the only way you're going to get anywhere is to have more people than just you report it on a regular basis. If it's just you, they're going to assume its something wrong with your system/room's ports/etc.

Are you running over wireless or a wired connection? Does it happen at all hours of the day, or only in the evenings (i.e. peak hours when everybody is online / doing homework / playing games / etc.)? They can only provide so much bandwidth to the campus, and when there's 12k+ students accessing the internet at the same time, it WILL drag down and packet loss will occur. It'll help if you're using wired instead of wireless somewhat though, as well.