Problems with internet connection: Not sure where the problem is comming from

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strommj20

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Jan 21, 2018
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First of all, I'm on windows 10

The issue:
It hasn't happened enough for me to pinpoint a specific time, or if it's general. However, I have noticed it most when I'm streaming, since I can physically see that my upload bitrate goes "red" for a couple seconds. Essentially It seems like my internet cuts out for a couple seconds and reconnects.

Symptoms:
Like I said above, I'll notice the upload bit rate will cut out for a second. I'll look over and the wifi signal on my router will flash for a second as well. I haven't been able to get a look at the modem lights yet, though. Also if I'm on call in discord, audio will respectively cut out for a couple seconds, Rainbow Six Seige (video game) will disconnect me from the game. Other games will lag out in a disconnected state.

(Actually as I'm writing this, I think this problem has been going on for me a little bit longer than I realize)

Here are the caveats:
Recently today, my internet connection icon on the task-bar in the lower right corner had a red x on it today, and said I didn't have connection, when I clearly "did" have a internet connection, and was communicating with friends just fine. With this, I wasn't able to open the network and sharing settings screen. I had updated my Intel(R) 1211 Gigabit Network Connection driver (it did find an update), ran the network adapter troubleshooter, and other internet troubleshooters, which all came up with nothing. I ran Kasperspy anti-virus which turned up with nothing. I eventually restarted my computer again and the red x went away. However this being said, restarting the computer doesn't normally fix this issue, so I'm still not sure what went wrong there or if this is related.

Also to note, we have restarted the router many times for other various reasons, and we are fairly confident that this doesn't fix this specific issue.

The second caveat is that my roommate claims that he has never experienced any problems related to this issue.

I have also recently reached out to Charter, and the agent 'tweaked' my router settings, although as I found out today, this didn't fix the issue.

My next item of research is that I'm going to try singling out the port/cable by switching me and my roommates connections to see if that makes a noticeable difference in the next couple days.

Otherwise, what do you guys think? Is this me? Or should I call Charter again and have them look at it more thoroughly?
 
Solution
anotherdrew
Your absolutely right that ping is so small and so infrequent (only 1 per second) that it's effects are negligible.

Only losing 30 out of 1200 is great ... 2735 ms response time is crap. If your lag events and the ping times sync up (it sounds like they do), then clearly your ISP has a router that is under a lot of strain (at times) and that is the source of most of your issues. You can share your results with them, but I can't promise they will do anything.

It sounds like you're running 2 monitors (or 2 computers). It wouldn't hurt to setup 3 ping windows simultaneously. One to your ISP, one to your LAN gateway, and the last to your public IP address. You can find your public IP address by logging into your router/modem. Pinging...
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bill001g

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Generally if you get a red X indicator it means there is a physical problem between the PC and the router....most times the cable.

Other failures like ip addresses etc give you a yellow indicator.

It would be strange that would keep running on a ethernet failure but your PC may be too smart. If you have a wireless card in your machine also it may switch over to that when the ethernet fails and then switch back when it thinks its good.

Short duration outages are tough to find, may times by the time you can test everything is back and fine. I would leave a constant ping run to the router in a background window. You are looking to see if you see packet loss when this occurs. All this confirms though is the problem is with the PC or its connection. If you do not see packet loss then it could be the router or something in the internet.

Ethernet cables can be very strange in the way they fail. Most times it is some issue with end connector being dirty or maybe just slightly loose. They can work on some machines but not others. It would be nice if they just didn't work at all when they failed.

Be careful to buy only pure copper cables. There is a lot of CCA cable on the market lately. This is not a certified cable and because of the use of copper and aluminum the ends tend to have more tendency to work loose because of the difference in expansion rates.
 
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strommj20

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Jan 21, 2018
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Umm, It's possible, although I don't think that would be the case. Me and my roommate don't do too much wifi stuff, it's generally hooked up to a ethernet cable. As well I don't think I mentioned this earlier, but when I do "notice" it, I notice it happen a couple times throughout that evening.



I actually don't have a wifi card in my pc



I'll have to give this a try sometime, as well I'll need to switch out some ethernet cables, or buy a new one to see about the possibility of a bad cable

Thanks, I will give some of these suggestions a try, and look into this further! I'll update this thread when I find out more information
 
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strommj20

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Jan 21, 2018
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So a recent development:

Me and my roommate were attempting to play league of legends and stream at the same time (Both of us streaming). I believe my bit rate is set to 2.5 Mbps upload and he is set to 3.5Mbps upload. Our charter internet "should" have 10Mbps upload. This would be a total of 6Mbps not including the upload required to play league of legends (which I assume is not nearly as much).

We both experienced the same problem this time, but at a much larger scale of the internet upload cutting out for 30 seconds to a minute (we could still hear our friends, so download must have been fine).

This makes me think that my minor issues above could be related to our physical upload speed limitations, however I have noticed this happen when my roommate is not even at the house.

Before this happened, I also switched out my ethernet cable, and tried different ports in the router, and those didn't help. I haven't tried the constant ping to the router yet.

I have also contacted Charter tech support, but they don't seem to see any problems with our router/modem. With this, the support tech said they didn't see anything in the error logs that indicated our stuff crashed. It appears that they are still receiving the signal externally, but something is happening internally.
 
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strommj20

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I have since tried pinging my router continuously. Within this time frame I sent ~10,000 packets to the router, and every one came back. the time it took usually varied from less than a millisecond to 1 ms. Occasionally it lagged and the response time was anywhere from 11-30ms.

As well within this time frame I had an occurrence of the issue where I was playing Rocket League and my connection disconnected, then was at a high ping for about 20 seconds or so until it settled down back to normal. During this time, I couldn't quite tell, but it seemed my discord call was unaffected.

With this, I think it's about time to call up charter once again and get them to send a guy over to analyze it, or maybe set some software up, etc. Or maybe I'll record some data with that one free network watcher, and send the data over to them to analyze?

Let me know if you guys have any other suggestions that I could try on my end.
 
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anotherdrew

anotherdrew

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Even the occasional 10-30 ms ping time to the router is not that bad. An extra 30 ms will not disconnect you from a game or discord. You can use software like pingplotter to monitor different segments of your connection. Personally I normally just do ping. You can find the IP address of ISP gateway by using tracert. If you do "tracert google.com" then the 2nd entry should be your ISP gateway (unless you are using multiple routers). Everything (mostly) past that is the internet and you have to be someone like Bill Gates to get that fixed.

You were saying that both you and your roommate were trying to upload simultaneously and it seemed you were limited. What happens when you run a speed test? Do you see the full 10 mbps?

Since you are talking about charter, I assume you have cable. Cable is a shared medium and while the bandwidth is quite high if everyone in your neighborhood facetimed at the same time, it would overwhelm it's capacity. If you live in a dense environment with many 20 somethings it can exacerbate that issue.
 
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strommj20

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Thanks for the response. I think I have since declared the issue where me and my roommate were trying to stream at the same time irrelevant, since this seems like a legitimate strain on our upload cap. Sorry I didn't state that in any of my updates (I don't think).

As well, we do not have cable, just internet from charter. As well this issue seems to not be restricted to just when we are both using the internet, As I have experienced it when alone in the house playing an online game (not even streaming)

Also, I will try your suggestion. I'll see if I can get the IP for the ISP and ping that some, and see if there is any failures.
 
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anotherdrew

anotherdrew

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Just some clarification. You might not have cable TV, but since you get internet from Charter it is probably provided over a coax cable (just like the one you use for cable TV) and thus is referred to as cable internet (as compared to internet you get over the phone line). The coax line that feeds your house, apt, or whatever is the same one that feeds all the houses, apt, etc around you. That is why it is shared ... not just you 2, but maybe 200+ people use the same line. With phone based internet, each house gets a different pair of copper wires ... not shared. But phone based internet (DSL mostly) is slower ... trade offs.

Also, if you really have a 10 mbps upload cap, then trying to upload 6 mpbs should not be impossible.

As far as pinging the ISP ... you should get less than a 2% failure rate, but more important is the consistency of the ping times. Good gaming does not require a lot of bandwidth, but it does require a consistent connection. If you get a bunch of data and then wait and then get a bunch of data and then wait more, you might get a lot of data on average (bandwidth), but you have tons of lag and terrible connection for gaming. For email, internet, and downloading it's fine ... for gaming it sucks.
 
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strommj20

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I have tried Playing Players Unknown Battlegrounds this evening, and was able to capture some activity with the above ping method. I used tracert to get the IP for the ISP, which for me it was the 3rd line (2nd line said it timed out).

Results: average response time was 12ms. Maximum = 2735ms
Packets Received = 12006, Lost = 30 (0% loss)

However there were a couple points in my games I was playing, where it became unresponsive. For example, I would open a door and it would do nothing, or I would catch up, or lag teleport when my connection came back. In these points, I looked over at my running ping command, and the packet was taking a long time, and timing out. I believe these moments is where it reached it's maximum response time of 2500ms. Now I'm not sure if continuously pinging the ISP IP has any extra strain on the game, but I don't know if I normally get this bad performance with this game (internet-wise). Although it's only packets of 32 bytes, so such a small amount shouldn't impact anything.
 
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strommj20

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Jan 21, 2018
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Actually just now reading your latest post after I posted my update. This then would make sense why I might not have experienced such bad connectivity before if it's a shared connection. I'll take this into consideration when I look into this further. Maybe i'll have my roommate do this same thing just to make sure if he really is not experiencing this as well. Because this is the only strange factor right now, is that he claims to not have any issues.
 
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anotherdrew

anotherdrew

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Your absolutely right that ping is so small and so infrequent (only 1 per second) that it's effects are negligible.

Only losing 30 out of 1200 is great ... 2735 ms response time is crap. If your lag events and the ping times sync up (it sounds like they do), then clearly your ISP has a router that is under a lot of strain (at times) and that is the source of most of your issues. You can share your results with them, but I can't promise they will do anything.

It sounds like you're running 2 monitors (or 2 computers). It wouldn't hurt to setup 3 ping windows simultaneously. One to your ISP, one to your LAN gateway, and the last to your public IP address. You can find your public IP address by logging into your router/modem. Pinging your public IP address (which is on the other side of your router) tests that your router is not being overloaded. It would be interesting to try streaming something while pinging that IP address. That would give you a better idea of what is slowing your upload.
 
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strommj20

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Jan 21, 2018
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Sorry I didn't ever have time to try the most recent thing you had suggested. I did eventually call up Charter to send over a service technician.

It turned out there was corrosion on the cable, as well we seemed to have a bad router (He did a speed test and got a .7 mb upload speed)

Thanks for all the help! I'll keep your most recent post as the accepted answer.
 
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