Charter Internet Connection Unstable

I'm thinking you have got to at least start with the cable co. DNS is just domain name resolution. It has nothing to do with bandwidth aka speed.

Could be an oversold node

It could be any number of things, most of them outboard from your house. Calling Charter is the way to start.

Also, keep a log of days and times when this happens. There may be a pattern to it.

+1 for keeping logs. Often times Level 1 tech support will "fail" to enter a call summary in your account. Ive had issues with ISPs (turned out to be their problem) and the entire process took 3 weeks longer to figure out because every tech just passed the buck to the next. By not putting call logs in the system, every new tech had to get a recap of the issue, go through all the fundamental troubleshooting...etc

Oversold node = 500 subscribers when they can only handle traffic for 200. If all 500 are online at the same time (just after dinner hour), response will suck.
They all do this, hoping all 500 don't go online at the same time.

Keep updating the logs until the situation is fixed. If you have more than a couple incidents before the end of the week, yes call.

Some years ago, a long running issue with the cable company prompted me into keeping logs. S/N ratio, incoming voltage, time, temperature, etc.
I could show a specific graph of when the signal died, etc. Eventually that pushed them into fixing their upstream equipment. Which was the problem in the first place.

ISPs will also never inform you of infrastructure downtime/ upgrades. the scenario I mentioned above was a personal experience I had with Cable One last week. They were doing massive node/ head end upgrades to accommodate their new 65 and 75 mbps packages. In preparation, they moved my node to another. I experienced weeks of slow downs due to utilization issues. 2+ weeks for them to take me seriously, then a tech came out and told me about the upgrade path and that they didnt think there would be any client issues.

Moral of the story; they will make changes a lot and not inform the customers effected. It just isnt cost effective. They will buy themselves time all the while knowing that the issue will be resolved shortly. Its pretty much common practice.

The thing that pissed me off the most was, had they just let me know what was going on out the gate, I would have been completely understanding. But they treated me like I was a lamens and blew me off (wasting valuable time). This is not the first case where I have brought unknown issues to the ISP.

So go to http://192.168.100.1

if you can and post the signal levels and error logs [remove the CM-MAC if it lists it in the error log messages]

I will try to diagnose what I can from miles away without a SLM.

In the mean time you say you have a router, try bypassing it and running a device directly off the modem and see if it occurs, also talk with any neighbors that have charter internet and see if they are experiencing the same thing not on line, in person, local neighbors. Several things can interfere with cable signals, the most common one is noise, which comes from loose fittings on active outlets in the house, not necessarily the modem line either, it can be a guest bedroom tv you never turn on, doing it. It may not even be at your house but we'll worry about that later. I suspect it is local to your house and this a problem with your lines, this is the MOST COMMON occurrence on coaxial networks. And by loose I mean I turn then 1/4 turn with my fingers [I work for comcast though not charter] to fix the issues, it is that sensitivity on the return path frequencies to noise..

Here is the diagnosis you requested Wacabletech. (I'm hoping its the right one you were asking for. If not I can totally copy the ones on the other tabs as well)

Its the right one, and they look good from what I can see. Hard to be 100% without knowing the plant but for the DOCSIS standard they meet the requirements, downstream channels shoudl be -10 to 10, and upstream shoudl be between 35 and 51. Yours are there.

As to your logs, not quite what I was looking for, if you want to fumble around I am looking for things that may say [and keep in mind this info may not be available on all modems] T3 time out errors, or T4 time out error, if you cannot find any of these [and let me clarify one if the data is 1970- they do not matter that initial locking with the cmts and not important, if they do not happen often we will not be too concerned with them either.

So using 5 houses is nothing, Our current network reduced design is 300 subs per node, I hear a lot of chatter about sharing bandwidth its not quite the way the uneducated make it seem, to be honest all forms of telecommunication share bandwidth at some point, fiber can only runs 2 carriers, and most systems pick one or the other and that's where it all goes. Eventuality all paths lead to a port on a router that goes to the internet, they are all merged at this point no matter what medium they use. DSL's selling point was just that, its really no different than cable's ads against dish or any other competitor, heck I even saw ads from comcast about wireless internet which was really just resold clearwire, but they made it sound like we made it better and faster, uh no, we bough clear wire cards, stuck out sticker on it, and put them in our stores. Always be wary of advertisers. In some areas, a NODE may be oversold but DSL has the same problem with a central office being oversold. Your issue sounds more like packet loss than bandwidth related though. Can you go to www.dslreports.com register, and the next time you think its happening hit their test tab and run a line quality test, this will give you a sort of trace route from the east and west coast to YOUR modem. If they show no problems then its on your side, maybe a bad modem Ethernet port or loose Ethernet cable, bad Ethernet cable bad router, wireless interference, etc.. if they show packet loss on the way to you its USUALLY at the last hop and then you have either a bad modem or some bad cabling. Once we figure out what it is more solutions can be provided, my suspicion as someone who installs and repairs coax for a living is you have some noise on your coax network causing t3 time outs this will likley be from loose fittings someone on the network [inside your house, at the ground block/splitters/tap, or some faulty cable, cheap old 59 form the 70's people seem to feel the need to continue to use 5 decades later, but its not their fault retailers continue to produce the design and sell the stuff... The charter tech will hopefully find this and fix it at your appointment.

You probably have a router set to NOT respond to external pings, that's fine the test just cannot run no bid deal, you can try a few different tests then,

open a cmd window and run
ping www.charter.net -t

minimize the window, when it happens again open it up and hit CTRL + C, it will give a summary, see how many packets are lost, this is not conclusive but ti will start providing some info hopefully. After that if there are packets lost, try
ping 192.168.100.1 -t and repeat, if packets are lost here its local on your side of the modem or the modem itself if this is clean and the other is not, its likley the modem or the cabling to the modem [coax].

Hi Sickness,

I've been having the same exact issue. I am in Central Mass and I have Charter as my ISP. My speedtest settings are nearly identical
to yours. My DNS started timing out badly this week, so I just switched over to an Open DNS to see if it would help . It has so far, so far so good. I was going crazy waiting 5 minutes for a page to load, if it would load at all.

I changed my dns settings to: 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220. Check the OpenDNS page for full instructions
on setting your Primary and Secondary Namerservers. http://use.opendns.com/


Or here are instructions for changing in Windows 7:

Windows 7

Click the Start Orb, then select Control Panel.
Click on Network and Sharing Center.
Click on your primary connection or Local Area Connection under Active Networks.
Click the Properties button.
Windows 7 may prompt you for permission to make network setting changes.
Highlight 'Internet Protocol Version 4' and click Properties.
Click the radio button 'Use the following DNS server addresses:' and type 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 in the Preferred DNS server and Alternate DNS server fields.
Click OK button, then the Close button, then Close again. Finally, close the Network and Sharing Center window.
At this point, we highly suggest that you flush your DNS resolver cache and web browser caches to ensure that your new configuration settings take effect.


Hope this helps. If I break down and call charter, I'll post anything I learn here.

So I never saw the 192.168.100.1 pings, but 22 packets may be indicative of your issue, now the question is where is it happening.