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:
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.
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 something on their servers?
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