Hello, I'm hoping someone can help me with my internet issue as I am becoming extremely frustrated with it. I've tried searching the internet for others having related problems, but nothing I've tried has helped at all. I consider myself to be fairly proficient with computers, but I'll admit I don't know much about networking and how connecting to the internet really works. Also, I hope I'm posting this in the correct forum.
I have wireless internet at my house. I live out in the country with lots of trees and hills around. so my options for high speed internet are limited. The receiver sits on the roof, getting the signal from across the canyon. The cable comes down into the house and connects into the transceiver (I think that's what it's called. It's a cable that plugs into the wall for power, while the other end of it has both male and female RJ45 jacks. The internet plugs into the female, and the male goes to the router). This transceiver is then plugged into an Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station router. There are two desktops connected to the router, both running Windows 7. I also have a laptop also running Windows 7, but I rarely ever use it and it's almost always turned off (it's never plugged into the router anyways).
Here's my problem. most of the time the internet works great and it's pretty speedy (not the fastest, but I wouldn't complain if it actually worked correctly). But sometimes when I'm browsing the internet, it will suddenly stop for a minute or two. Even while trying to load a simple Google search in a new tab, it will just sit there on a blank screen and I can see it say in the corner "Waiting for www.google.com...". Nothing else really seems to work during this time either. But after a minute or two everything just resumes like nothing ever happened. Both Windows and my router will not report any errors or drops in connectivity during this time.
I do a lot of online gaming, and this is my bigger concern and perhaps a bigger clue in the mystery. Lately I've been playing an MMORPG, and I notice the lag a lot more. But, 95% of the time when I'm playing and get lag, the lag is only on the upload side. I can see everything around me happening perfectly fine in real time, only I can't take any action at all. It's like the download side is running fine, but the upload is stuck. Again, after about a minute everything will resume like normal, but usually by that time I will have disconnected from the server. This can happen every two minutes sometimes, and I can't stay logged in for more than a few minutes (but the download almost always works fine).
There have been occasions where I've stayed up late playing, and I've noticed that this lag seems to go away around 11 or 12 at night and everything seems to work beautifully and I won't get a disconnect for 4-5 hours of playing time. I've noticed the lag happening at just about any given time during the day hours though. There has also been times where I can play throughout the entire day without any issues at all, although that's pretty rare. This made me think that it was just the ISP getting bogged down during the peak hours of the day, so I gave them a call and after explaining my situation, they took a look at from their end and said everything was working fine and I shouldn't be having any lag, and basically told me it was my problem.
I should also mention that all of these problems occur on every computer I've ever tried connecting to this router/internet.
I'll also say that I've had this internet for around 6 years. The first few years I had it, it worked fantastically and I never had any problems with it at all. Although after that, the quality began to slowly degrade into the problem I'm currently having over the course of maybe three years. Back when it was first installed, I could play MMOs all day with no problems at all. I don't think anything has really changed since then, as far as the setup of the network or computers.
So, I started searching around on the internet and trying some of the fixes suggested. Here's a few things that I've tried.
One site suggested that my router could be at fault for whatever reason. So I tried plugging the internet transceiver directly into my laptop to see if it would fix my problem. No luck there, same issues. I think it's safe to say the problem isn't with my router, but I guess I could be wrong.
With that said, in my desperation I also tried downloading Apple's AirPort Utility that allows me to directly connect with the router and change various settings. I tried messing with the options in there, including doing things like disabling the WiFi, setting it to "bridge mode", and even doing a factory reset. Not that I was particularly expecting it to, but none of this helped.
I also read up a bit on I believe what they call "packet sniffing" and downloaded a program called WireShark. Although, this program is a bit overwhelming for me as I don't really understand everything it deals with or even what I'm supposed to be looking for.
I've tried doing pings and traceroutes in command prompt. Results are somewhat scattered. Sometime all four pings go through almost instantly, and sometimes there's a delay in one or two.
One thing I noticed the other day that I thought might be relevant is that I noticed one particular tree in my yard has grown quite high over the years and it could be that it's getting in the way of the signal (we just planted it a few years back and it was initially very small). It's a bit hard to tell from ground level if it's actually in the way or not, and I haven't yet been able to get on the roof to really check it out. But, if this were the cause, I would love to know the reason why the download signal comes through perfectly fine, while the upload signal is somehow blocked. This makes me think it isn't the cause, but maybe I'm overlooking something. I'll try to check it out in the next few days as it will probably become a problem eventually anyways.
For reference (or if you don't know what I'm talking about), here's the website for my ISP: https://www.cal.net/
I have the "Wireless Internet" option.
Here's a tracert to TomsHardware as of the time of writing this message:
And a Ping:
And here's a latency test from www.pingtest.net. The packet loss part wouldn't work, not sure why. I have Java installed and told it to allow the test to run.
http://www.pingtest.net/result/83050072.png
If you require any other information from me, please let me know. I would love to get this issue resolved soon, as internet lag is one of the few things that makes me seriously angry
Thanks for reading, and especially thank you so much to everyone who contributes.
--Aaron
I have wireless internet at my house. I live out in the country with lots of trees and hills around. so my options for high speed internet are limited. The receiver sits on the roof, getting the signal from across the canyon. The cable comes down into the house and connects into the transceiver (I think that's what it's called. It's a cable that plugs into the wall for power, while the other end of it has both male and female RJ45 jacks. The internet plugs into the female, and the male goes to the router). This transceiver is then plugged into an Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station router. There are two desktops connected to the router, both running Windows 7. I also have a laptop also running Windows 7, but I rarely ever use it and it's almost always turned off (it's never plugged into the router anyways).
Here's my problem. most of the time the internet works great and it's pretty speedy (not the fastest, but I wouldn't complain if it actually worked correctly). But sometimes when I'm browsing the internet, it will suddenly stop for a minute or two. Even while trying to load a simple Google search in a new tab, it will just sit there on a blank screen and I can see it say in the corner "Waiting for www.google.com...". Nothing else really seems to work during this time either. But after a minute or two everything just resumes like nothing ever happened. Both Windows and my router will not report any errors or drops in connectivity during this time.
I do a lot of online gaming, and this is my bigger concern and perhaps a bigger clue in the mystery. Lately I've been playing an MMORPG, and I notice the lag a lot more. But, 95% of the time when I'm playing and get lag, the lag is only on the upload side. I can see everything around me happening perfectly fine in real time, only I can't take any action at all. It's like the download side is running fine, but the upload is stuck. Again, after about a minute everything will resume like normal, but usually by that time I will have disconnected from the server. This can happen every two minutes sometimes, and I can't stay logged in for more than a few minutes (but the download almost always works fine).
There have been occasions where I've stayed up late playing, and I've noticed that this lag seems to go away around 11 or 12 at night and everything seems to work beautifully and I won't get a disconnect for 4-5 hours of playing time. I've noticed the lag happening at just about any given time during the day hours though. There has also been times where I can play throughout the entire day without any issues at all, although that's pretty rare. This made me think that it was just the ISP getting bogged down during the peak hours of the day, so I gave them a call and after explaining my situation, they took a look at from their end and said everything was working fine and I shouldn't be having any lag, and basically told me it was my problem.
I should also mention that all of these problems occur on every computer I've ever tried connecting to this router/internet.
I'll also say that I've had this internet for around 6 years. The first few years I had it, it worked fantastically and I never had any problems with it at all. Although after that, the quality began to slowly degrade into the problem I'm currently having over the course of maybe three years. Back when it was first installed, I could play MMOs all day with no problems at all. I don't think anything has really changed since then, as far as the setup of the network or computers.
So, I started searching around on the internet and trying some of the fixes suggested. Here's a few things that I've tried.
One site suggested that my router could be at fault for whatever reason. So I tried plugging the internet transceiver directly into my laptop to see if it would fix my problem. No luck there, same issues. I think it's safe to say the problem isn't with my router, but I guess I could be wrong.
With that said, in my desperation I also tried downloading Apple's AirPort Utility that allows me to directly connect with the router and change various settings. I tried messing with the options in there, including doing things like disabling the WiFi, setting it to "bridge mode", and even doing a factory reset. Not that I was particularly expecting it to, but none of this helped.
I also read up a bit on I believe what they call "packet sniffing" and downloaded a program called WireShark. Although, this program is a bit overwhelming for me as I don't really understand everything it deals with or even what I'm supposed to be looking for.
I've tried doing pings and traceroutes in command prompt. Results are somewhat scattered. Sometime all four pings go through almost instantly, and sometimes there's a delay in one or two.
One thing I noticed the other day that I thought might be relevant is that I noticed one particular tree in my yard has grown quite high over the years and it could be that it's getting in the way of the signal (we just planted it a few years back and it was initially very small). It's a bit hard to tell from ground level if it's actually in the way or not, and I haven't yet been able to get on the roof to really check it out. But, if this were the cause, I would love to know the reason why the download signal comes through perfectly fine, while the upload signal is somehow blocked. This makes me think it isn't the cause, but maybe I'm overlooking something. I'll try to check it out in the next few days as it will probably become a problem eventually anyways.
For reference (or if you don't know what I'm talking about), here's the website for my ISP: https://www.cal.net/
I have the "Wireless Internet" option.
Here's a tracert to TomsHardware as of the time of writing this message:
And a Ping:
And here's a latency test from www.pingtest.net. The packet loss part wouldn't work, not sure why. I have Java installed and told it to allow the test to run.
http://www.pingtest.net/result/83050072.png
If you require any other information from me, please let me know. I would love to get this issue resolved soon, as internet lag is one of the few things that makes me seriously angry
Thanks for reading, and especially thank you so much to everyone who contributes.
--Aaron
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