EVERY NIGHT, at the same damn time, I've been having packet loss for over a month now. I have had three separate technicians come out and change shit over the past two weeks, including running a dedicated line to my apartment and giving me a new router, but I am still having issues. This is happening over both ethernet and wifi, and I know it's not an issue with my hardware, but my isp says they've done everything they can.
My internet is fine during the daytime; this is happening from sundown to sunrise, so I had a theory that one of the street lights being on is messing with the wires through some short or interference or something, but my isp just refused to pursue anything further. It would probably be a city utilities issues too and I probably can't get the ball rolling on that one either.
And the frustrating part is that this isn't constant. It's just losing packets for about 1-3 seconds, long enough to fuck up a connection and boot me from games and shit. Download speeds and discord chat are fine though. So when they check my connection they see everything is fine. I had to have the fucking supervisor come to my apartment and show him the packet loss through my command prompt before they realized that something is wrong.
What the fuck can I do, is there something I'm missing??? I've been wanting to stream but anything that requires a constant connection gets fucked after dark. :angery:
Upgrading my router helped me. My speed was good but the connection quality was dog shit. Turns out the 5 year old router just sucked.
I would recommend checking that your CAT5 (or whatever CAT-x cabling) you're using is properly terminated, and if you're running bundles of cables together, that they're shielded. That should prevent crosstalk, which might be the cause of your packet loss.
Would that be something around my router or around the poles outside? And I would think it would be a constant issue all day if that were the case
CAT5 is a type of ethenet cable. You probably have one running from your router to PC, and maybe one from your modem to your router, if you have a modem. If your ISP is using copper cabling, that also might be a problem if they're unshielded.
Yeah it's a cat5e. And for what it's worth the time table of problems has shifted. It now only lasts until 8:30 pm instead of until 7 am apparently (so now it's a timeframe of 2 hours vs the previous 13 hours; and this is after they changed modems)
If it's electromagnetic interference from something outside (e.g., electrical noise from a street light), I'm wondering if replacing your CAT5e cable runs with CAT6 would have any benefit. CAT6 uses heavier gauge wires and slightly beefier shielding, but it's a little stiff if you need to do any tight bends. Also make sure your cables aren't running too close to any heating vents or radiators or anything like that. If you want to rule out a cable having an internal short, pull up command prompt/PowerShell/terminal/whatever you have and start a continuous ping against a known-good IP or hostname (e.g., Google). If you're on Windows, that looks like:
ping -t google.comAnd then Ctrl+C to exit when you're done. While the continuous ping is running, try jiggling connectors and flexing some of the cables between your PC and your router. Not too hard, mind you -- there's an inner core/spacer that keeps the wire pairs from getting too close together and causing interference, and it could be bad if that breaks. But if you get any ping timeouts that coincide with bending a cable or jiggling a connector, you either have a loose plug or a bad cable.
If it's not that, I'd see about pinging another device on your internal network, if you have one (e.g., if you know the internal IP for your modem or router; better yet, open two windows and ping both). Run a continuous ping against that during the evening -- if you don't get any packet drops, then the problem is with your ISP, because it's happening outside your network. If you do get packet drops, then it's on your end somewhere.
Unfortunately I've done all of that lol. Both my desktop (hard wired) and laptop (wifi) showed packet loss at the exact same times (through the command prompt method you suggested and app monitors), and I have moved all of the cables around and tried different ports in the modem and pc to make sure it wasn't an issue with them. I used that ping command to prove it to the isp supervisor when he showed up and have been trying to convince them it is an issue on their end This is unfortunately where I have hit a wall with them. They've just been throwing physical solutions at me that don't extent outside of my apartment when it makes more sense that it's something beyond or on the pole my internet is connected to, which unfortunately seems to move into the territory of city utilities. The only thing that has changed is the window when the issues take place (after they gave me a new modem). It starts at the same time every night (6:15 pm), but now ends at 8:30 pm instead of 7 am.
Oh and this has happened with two different ethernet cables
Have you tried tracert, to see on which hop connection times out? If it’s first one or two it’s likely local (router) + you may see an address where problem occurs. Also if it’s further away, vpn could help.
No, first time I've heard about that. Will try tomorrow though
Ok I ran it and it consistently timed out on the second hop and had asterisks or a timeout on the 11th hop. I ran it 5 times.
(edit) I ran the trace on google
This sucks then:( 2 hop is (likely) between your router to the first isp switch/node, so problem is either in the cable in the street or in their equipment. At least you can describe it to them I guess:(
11th hop on the other hand is some fuckery that vpn could potentially fix. Try something like protonvpn or similar free vpn thingy to see if it helps with that part.
Additionally, try tracing not to google.com, but direct ip address like 1.1.1.1 (cloudflare) or 8.8.8.8 (google) to check if some default isp’s dns fucks up on 11th hop under load at that time. But other than that no idea:(
I tried 8.8.8.8 just now and the first two hops time out. I'll be calling them tomorrow anyway to see if they can't switch nodes as someone else suggested and I'll talk to them about traceroutes too.
but they say that melt my brain waves and make me gay :whywhywhywhywhy:
I don't know how much more gay I can fit in me I'm about to bust
It'll just drop for a few seconds every few minutes
uhhhhh it doesn't exactly have an error log per se, the only thing that shows substance is the event log that is showing some issues with ipv6. I looked around and am trying it on the stateless setting
(edit) I unfortunately won't know if this has a positive effect until tomorrow night
(edit edit) it didn't do anything
I work for an ISP. Can you tell me a bit more about the situation?
I assume you're leasing a combo modem/router from your ISP - who is your ISP, and what kind of modem/router is it (model/supported techonology)? What speed is your connection, and how densely populated is your neighborhood? Are you in an apartment complex or similar?
Leasing only a modem through Wowway (Wow!) (East coast). Arris DG3450A, which I mainly use through ethernet. 500mbs (which I do get reliably) and they switched out my last modem with a 1gb modem (as they described it). I live in suburbish area and it's in a "historic" part of the city, so the infrastructure is aging. And to top it all off I live in the basement of an old-ass house retrofitted into three apartments. I now have a line directly to my unit from the utility poles though.
Arris DG3450A
Oh yikes, this thing supports MoCA. Do you have anything else connected to it? Cable box?
How's the power in your basement unit? Do you get fluctuations at all? When someone upstairs turns on a dryer or microwave do your lights dim? Is your area subject to brownouts or blackouts?
oh god what does that mean lol. The power will go out every now and then, but that is very very rare. The only thing that makes the power fluctuate daily is my window AC units, and to a lesser extent, my own pc (which only happens when I power it on after I wake up). As for my neighbors I have no clue, but they do have the same window units too. I haven't seen my power flicker when their units turn on. I do have my own breaker and from what me and my father have seen from the wiring, my power connection should be my own. Those are all-day things though.
MoCA is an even shittier version of powerline ethernet, where it sends an ethernet signal back through the coaxial cable in order to provide data to things like set-top-boxes, or so they don't have to run ethernet in a unit that already has coax. It sucks. Everything that supports it is terrible. It's completely half-baked in every respect, and if the cable company hasn't properly terminated everything at the NID (the grey box on the side of the building where the line from the utility pole terminates), MoCA will just send your LAN out into the wild, where it will connect with who-knows-what, often your neighbor's equipment.
We can probably rule out power issues - if you regularly have voltage drops that can result in equipment behaving strangely, but it doesn't sound like you do. If you only have internet from WOW, I would very strongly recommend buying your own modem and router - eliminate MoCA, lower your monthly bill, and probably have a more reliable connection. The certification/recertification process for ISP equipment is dogshit, and they will regularly re-certify completely nonfunctional equipment, box it up, and give it to techs like it's new. I personally had low throughput, dropped packets, and inexplicable lag spikes until I replaced the ISP-issued combo device with my own dedicated modem and router.
I would recommend the Motorola MB7621 modem since that supports speeds up to 600Mbps. It's $90 most places, and you can get a decent router for even less. The TP-Link AC1750 Archer A7 is around $60, performs like a champ, supports alternative firmware, and is easy to set up. Plus having your own equipment means you don't have to deal with your ISP's bullshit, you can change DNS servers so they don't redirect your traffic, and they can't log into your router's admin page anymore. Put all of this stuff on a surge protector, don't plug it straight into the wall.
Edit: I should mention that I can't rule out the possibility that it is something on the ISP's side. There's a chance that moving from a DOCSIS 3.0 modem to a DOCSIS 3.1 modem reduced your issues from all night to a couple hours because it supports more channels and switches over to un-fucked channels after a while. It's also possible that another customer has MoCA going out and fucking with your connection, but getting your own modem should help with that.
I was wondering what that was, but it does seem like MoCA is disabled by default if that makes a difference. And yeah my paranoid ass has all my hardware on a surge protector. I'll have to look into getting my own modem, which I honestly should have done in the first place. I didn't feel like bothering with it at the time since it was my first time moving out on my own since college, but to be fair it took nine months to cause issues.
You should also ask if you can get moved to a different node or a different card on the same node the next time you talk to a field tech, particularly if getting your own modem doesn't fix it.
You will need to tell the ISP the modem's MAC address, and possibly the make/model, when setting it up. Otherwise there's not much to it.
Node as in the box on the corner of the road or in a parking lot nearby that has their fiber optic cable going in one end and a bunch of coax going out the other end.
In modern network topology, everything is fiber until it gets close to your house, where a device takes the bandwidth coming in on a larger fiber link and splits it up into dozens or hundreds of smaller connections going out over coaxial, phone line, or (sometimes, if you're lucky) fiber. In ISP parlance, those devices are nodes.
Ah ok thanks actually, I'll see if they can't do that next time I call them
Ok this might be a little out there, but could the DHCP releasing every day cause an issue like this? I was looking around the modem some more and saw that the DHCP lease was set to renew every day and set it to release weekly instead, and so far I'm not having issues tonight. I had been wondering if something updating nightly might be messing with the connection and that was the closet thing I could think of.
Even if you were doing DHCP renewal every 1440 minutes, it should only knock you out for a couple of minutes max, and then it would be smooth sailing.
Unless something's horrendously fucked at WOW.
I... wouldn't doubt it lol
I've got a tech coming out tomorrow to see what we can't do