help me, internet: how do I improve my internetz? [Solved]

Aldo

So we recently moved into our new apartment on the top floor of a 1950s complex and it is super rad, we have all the space and a spare room and a baby room and soooooo much stuff to do. I am struggling with one issue I can't put my finger on and it's driving me up the walls.

We're paying for 40Mbit internet and it's that fast most of the time, but every few minutes the connection just drops to a measly <1Mbit. It's making online videogaming (something I love),imgur-browsing (something my girlfriend loves) and Netflixing (something we both love) very annoying.

I've tried the following:
different cable
wi-fi instead of wired
wired instead of wi-fi
plugged it directly into the modem instead of the repeater
resetted the modem a bunch of times

None of it worked. I called the cable company and they said nothing weird is in their logs and they can't help me.

So my question is: what else can I try? Or would the best fix be to pay for a higher internet speed?

TL;DR: internet speed randomly drops for a few secs every few minutes. What can I do?

JebusUD

How old is the modem? Might be time for a new one. Sounds like what mine did before it died.

And your network is secured right? No neighbors torrenting massive amounts of porn off you?

bowen

Is the modem a combination router?

That's definitely something related to either a modem or a router.

minirhyder

Maybe you're running something that's causing it?

I had a similar issue where I had enormous spikes every few minutes that made online gaming pretty much impossible for me. Turned out it was my Plex server causing it.

Have you tried running a traceroute to see where the spikes are happening?

Aldo

The modem is brand new and it is secured. Considering the randomness and length of the spikes I'm ruling out massive downloads. It's entirely possible that one of our devices is downloading stuff in the background, but it shouldn't be this much.

I do believe the cable company provided us with a combination router/modem to which I connected my own router for wi-fi. I had the same set up at my previous place and it ran without trouble, but could it be an issue now?

The traceroute to my FFXIV server is in the spoiler...

1	 	 	 	*	*	*

			
2	hos-tr4.juniper2.rz13.hetzner.de	213.239.224.97	de	0.201 ms	 	 
hos-tr1.juniper1.rz13.hetzner.de	213.239.224.1	de	0.214 ms	 
hos-tr4.juniper2.rz13.hetzner.de	213.239.224.97	de	0.201 ms

			
3	core22.hetzner.de	213.239.245.121	de	0.201 ms	 	 
core21.hetzner.de	213.239.245.81	de	0.270 ms	 
core22.hetzner.de	213.239.245.121	de	0.201 ms

			
4	core11.hetzner.de	213.239.245.221	de	2.799 ms	2.789 ms	 
core12.hetzner.de	213.239.245.214	de	2.757 ms

			
5	juniper4.rz2.hetzner.de	213.239.203.138	de	2.776 ms	 	 
juniper4.rz2.hetzner.de	213.239.245.26	de	2.767 ms	 
juniper4.rz2.hetzner.de	213.239.203.138	de	2.776 ms

			
6	ae55.edge7.Frankfurt1.Level3.net	195.16.162.253	gb	7.250 ms	 	 
ae51.bar2.Munich1.Level3.net	62.140.25.101	gb	17.130 ms	17.125 ms

			
7	ae-4-90.edge5.Frankfurt1.Level3.net	4.69.154.201	us	9.324 ms	7.318 ms	 
ae-1-60.edge5.Frankfurt1.Level3.net	4.69.154.9	us	9.295 ms

			
8	9.398 ms	9.364 ms	 
KDDI-DEUTSC.edge5.Frankfurt1.Level3.net	212.162.4.98	gb	6.413 ms

			
9	8.503 ms	 	 
 		nl		

			
10	 	 	 	*	*	*

			
11	 	 	 	*	*	*

			
12	 	 	 	*	*	*
No reply for 3 hops. Assuming we reached firewall.

Is this bad? 25% of no ping can't be good, right? :?

Any advice on how I should go about isolating the issue further? As you can tell I am no pro on this subject.

tinwhiskers

Aldo wrote: »

None of it worked. I called the cable company and they said nothing weird is in their logs and they can't help me.

Yeah, but they'll tell you that regardless.

Have you just running a continuous ping?

ping www.google.com -t

See if your 'lag spikes' are a bunch of packets getting lost rather than your download speed decreasing.

I'd bet on the modem they gave you being a PoS. Otherwise it could also be something related to your hook-up. My cable company ended up having to run new coax from the pole to my house in order to fix an issue like this.

Orogogus

On other end, you could try to isolate it by disabling wifi (to make sure that no one else using it) then plugging in a computer with nearly all background programs disabled from Task Manager and then try one of the activities where it's noticeable -- imgur-browsing seems like the easiest one to test.

Aldo

I had 1 timed out ping out of 50 to google, to the FFXIV server it's 5 out of 50. Is any number above 0 a problem?

God only knows how old the coax cables are in this building, would other home owners notice the same problems as me if that was the issue?

*edit:
I will test with different set-ups, but I'm not sure how much that's going to specify the problem for me, disabling wifi should be interesting regardless.

DevoutlyApathetic

Aldo it might be helpful to look up the specific number of the router/modem they gave you online. In the US at least it's usually easy to find the default password and IP and then you can see more diagnostic information that might help.

bowen

Tracerts pretty much never work 100%.

ping is a good indication of stability rather than anything else

bandwidth testing requires a lot of shit

Shadowfire

Aldo wrote: »

I do believe the cable company provided us with a combination router/modem to which I connected my own router for wi-fi. I had the same set up at my previous place and it ran without trouble, but could it be an issue now?

Out of curiosity, are you sure that the box the cable company provided you with is a router as well? If so, and you connected your own router to it, that could be part of the problem. Most cable connections (and others, for that matter) get real pissy when you have multiple DHCP servers running on one connection.

Aldo

Shadowfire wrote: »

Aldo wrote: »

I do believe the cable company provided us with a combination router/modem to which I connected my own router for wi-fi. I had the same set up at my previous place and it ran without trouble, but could it be an issue now?

Out of curiosity, are you sure that the box the cable company provided you with is a router as well? If so, and you connected your own router to it, that could be part of the problem. Most cable connections (and others, for that matter) get real pissy when you have multiple DHCP servers running on one connection.

I will dick around with/without it and see if I notice any differences

DA: I will, and will post when I have more data.

SanderJK

I don't know which company you're with but I have good experiences with both Tele2 and Telfort tech support. They should be able to run similar tests up until the router.

Aldo

SanderJK wrote: »

I don't know which company you're with but I have good experiences with both Tele2 and Telfort tech support. They should be able to run similar tests up until the router.

yeeaah it's Ziggo. Im considering switching to Telfort if this doesnt pan out, as that is the provider the previous owner used.

Kick_04

The first thing I do when I start having networking problems is go into command and do "ipconfig /flushdns". Don't know if that would fix this type of issue.

If you can log into your router can monitor traffic and also try and switch ip address. The most recent time we had lots of problems with internet, house phone dropping calls, tv couldn't connect, etc... it apparently came from when we reset it one time it landed on ipaddy.5 and .5 was known to be less stable in my area with the new wires.

I know very little about networking, could of been a load of crap I was told about the stable/unstable ip addresses.

tinwhiskers

Aldo wrote: »

I had 1 timed out ping out of 50 to google, to the FFXIV server it's 5 out of 50. Is any number above 0 a problem?

God only knows how old the coax cables are in this building, would other home owners notice the same problems as me if that was the issue?

*edit:
I will test with different set-ups, but I'm not sure how much that's going to specify the problem for me, disabling wifi should be interesting regardless.

just keep it running, and when you notice one of the huge slow downs. go look at it.

But yes 10% packet loss is bad. You are using 10% of your bandwidth just to resend packets, most protocols will throttle down your bandwidth(packet loss is basically how they know how much bandwidth you have), and for something like a game or video where you need the packets in order, you'll spend lots of time waiting on the missing packets to come so it can put them all in order and show you the video correctly.

Pantshandshake

Unscrew any coax connection you can access between the pole and your device. Make sure whatever you call the inside of a coax wire hasn't pulled itself loose from the external part. Then make sure all the connections are appropriately tightened when you reconnect them.

Aldo

Coax cable comes directly out of a wall and seems to be fine.

I plugged out the ASUS router I had attached to my cable company router/modem, rebooted the router/modem and it appears to be more stable now. I got through a complete game of HotS without lag spikes. Then I rebooted the ASUS router and got a massive lagspike watching a gif of a complete commercial for bottled water, followed by a steadier connection afterwards. I now have that ASUS router set in repeater mode and we haven't noticed any issues all evening.

I'm not sure what is going on here, but I guess it's the results that count.

*e: I did see a few random spikes, though, but the connection didn't time out, so those didn't bother me as they happened.

bowen

The router was likely acting as a DHCP server and the broadcast packets of DHCP were probably hammering your network pretty hard every so often as they had a mismatch of problems. Now that it's a slave to the other you should be fine.

Daenris

Yeah, as mentioned multiple routers don't really like playing together on the same network without being carefully set up the right way. If you prefer to use your own router then look in the cable company router settings for an option to turn on "bridge mode" which will make it work like just a modem essentially and you can reconnect your own router to it. Though sometimes it's not accessible by the end user in the settings and you might have to contact their support people to have them put your gateway into bridge mode.

Foomy

If you plug one router into another you need to disable the DHCP server on one of em, so that they act as a switch instead of a router.

If you have two DHCP servers running on the same network without limiting what addresses each can assign to eliminate overlap then they will basically fight over what IP to assign to each machine on the network, so that would lead to packet loss and lag spikes as they would be swapping addressees around.