Mysterious internet connection problem

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W00dmann

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Recently our house was "upgraded" to a fibre optic network by our ISP. They installed a new modem + router in the process. Since then, my gf and I have been noticing our devices will disconnect & lose internet connection at seemingly random intervals, typically once every few days - but it could be more often than that and we just aren't noticing.

This afternoon, I was sitting at my workstation. I have one computer connected "wired" via wireline, and the other is strictly wireless. They sit near each other. I suddenly found BOTH lacking connection to internet. My wireless connection came back after less than a minute; the wireline didn't come back, requiring a full reboot of the wireline "boxes". Major PITA.

I am running an application that will need access to the internet 24/7. I cannot have the internet drop out on me for any reason at any time, period, full stop. How can I troubleshoot this? I want to be able to monitor internet connection 24/7 over a week or two and identify when it's dropping out to look for patterns. Obviously, I also need to find out the root cause of this unacceptable behaviour. Any suggestions are very much appreciated!
 
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Run the tracert command they are hop 1 and hop 2.

You will need to look at the screens fairly quickly after it happens the ping commands will cycle off the cmd window fairly quickly..like in a couple minutes. You can change the buffer size in the properties to up to 1000 lines if I remember correctly which still is not real long. Now the total loss and average latency will be reported when you terminate the command even if you run it for a year.

I run have ping running all the time to a couple places my ISP tends to have issues with. I think the default is to send 64byte packets every 2 seconds. It should not be a lot of data and really you could only run it while you were actually using the machine.

I tend to forget to...
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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"I am running an application that will need access to the internet 24/7. I cannot have the internet drop out on me for any reason at any time, period, full stop."

With a residential account, this is an impossible request.
With that out of the way...

Have you talked to the ISP about your connection dropouts?
What country? What ISP?
 
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Samer1970

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Either you get business grade connection which is very expensive , OR get ANOTHER Home internet service from ANOTHER Company and use both , in case one disconnects , the other still works , This is a cheaper way.

get a 2 WAN router with load balancing (in case you want to join them for x2 speed)
 
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W00dmann

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That's why I'm here - to try and find strategies to try and mitigate / reduce / eliminate this issue.
 
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W00dmann

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Thanks for your reply. I didn't know this was basically impossible. Perhaps I should rephrase things a bit: prior to our "upgrade", I can't hardly recall our internet ever cutting out - if it happened at all, it was so infrequent as to be unnoticeable. However, since the "upgrade", we seem to have dropped connections once or twice a day. I need to troubleshoot this somehow in order to reduce that to an acceptable number.

I'm in Canada, and our ISP is Telus.

Thanks again,
 
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W00dmann

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Thanks Samer, I hope I don't have to go to the trouble of getting a business account. This problem never occurred prior to our upgrade - or at least, rarely enough that we never noticed. Now, it's once or twice a day. I may not be able to get mission-critical 24/7 connection, but I'm hoping to dig up strategies to troubleshoot and reduce this issue. Thx,
 
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bill001g

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It is the pretty standard run the continuous ping test method of finding this....that does not mean it will fix it just detect it.

So first you run tracert to some common server like 8.8.8.8

You then open multiple cmd windows and run a continuous ping command to hop1 which is your router, hop 2 which the ISP first router in most cases and then the final address like 8.8.8.8

If you have issues with hop 1 then it is your router itself having a issue. If you have no issues with hop1 but issues with hop2 it generally represent a problem with with cabling between your house and the ISP. Problems past this point represent issue in your ISP network or even issues between ISP in the path to the server.

You might get the ISP to fix hop2 especially when you can show it is a fairly constant problem. When it happens only infrequently it will be very hard to find for the ISP.

Even if you had a the best commercial connection there is it can take up to 3 minutes to switch over to a backup connection. This can also happen within all the connections between ISP if they would need to fail over to a redundant connection. Your traffic will get stuck for the time it takes to do this switch.

Now if you really have the requirement you do then that is why large companies still buy private network connections rather than using the internet to connect to things. You would buy a private connection between the sites and you will get much better availability...but nothing stops the outage because the backhoe dug up the fiber down the street from you.
 
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USAFRet

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A wired and WiFi pc going out at the same time points to the modem/router being faulty, or something upstream under the control of the ISP.

Keep a detailed log of when it goes out and for how long. See if there is some sort of pattern to the outages.
But the ISP is who you need to work with.
 
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W00dmann

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Thanks Bill, those are excellent ideas. A few follow-on questions if I may:
1. If I setup a continuous ping, will it run 24/7 for, say a week?
2. If I ping an internet IP address for a week solid, how much "data" would that "cost" me? Eg. if I have 100GB data allotment per month, will it eat into that data simply by pinging a site? I have no concept of how much data goes back and forth if pinging 24/7, even tho' I'm sure it's minimal amounts, perhaps it adds up?
3. How can I determine the IP address of a) my router; b) my ISP's "first router"?

Thanks again, I know these are pretty basic questions but network issues vex me.
 
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bill001g

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Run the tracert command they are hop 1 and hop 2.

You will need to look at the screens fairly quickly after it happens the ping commands will cycle off the cmd window fairly quickly..like in a couple minutes. You can change the buffer size in the properties to up to 1000 lines if I remember correctly which still is not real long. Now the total loss and average latency will be reported when you terminate the command even if you run it for a year.

I run have ping running all the time to a couple places my ISP tends to have issues with. I think the default is to send 64byte packets every 2 seconds. It should not be a lot of data and really you could only run it while you were actually using the machine.

I tend to forget to restart it so I run it all the time because by the time I run the commands the problem has normally resolved. Still all I use this for is to confirm that my machines and router and are not acting up and it is the ISP being bad again and I can just have to live with it until it resolves or wait on hold on the ISP call line and have it magically go away before I can talk to someone.

Hop1 will not count against your cap. Hop2 may not either because normally the monitor past their first router not to the router itself.

There are all kinds of network motoring tools that will produce pretty graphs and stuff but they tend to be overkill for finding problems.
 
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Solution
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W00dmann

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Thanks Bill, but I still don't understand. I think I need a step-by-step instruction on what to type into the CMD line, or how to set its properties in order to get it to run 24/7? That would greatly assist, thanks!
 
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