Can't pin down a network issue [Resolved]

Aumni

Hi guys,

Had this network issues for a past month or so. It started when we had a storm pass by ( a few weeks before Sandy). Power kicked off and my router died. Bought a new router - all of a sudden anytime I'm streaming or downloading anything (not even torrent-based) all other activity times out and is basically unresponsive.

Prior to the router going out I had no problem running a youtube video while playing Diablo. Or even just browsing the web. Now if I have a youtube/netflix/hulu video up I frequently get timed out in other windows so I'm basically in tunnel vision mode. Multitasking is dead. My speeds aren't horrible - I can get 1-2 Mbytes on downloads, and before this wouldn't really have an adverse effect. Even using 30-40k upload I could still function pretty reasonably.

Now I'm not entirely illiterate when it comes to technology - in addition to doing all the normal cmd tricks I ended up formatting my computer as well as getting a new modem (the one I had was ancient, so it needed an upgrade). Currently my network is:

Motorola Cable modem (sb6121) > Netgear (Gigabit) router > Computer. All wired.

Network settings on the router are pretty much default. I tried playing around with QoS settings, but no luck. I've swapped out wires and am pretty much out of ideas.

The only thing I can think of that I haven't tried yet is a new NIC in my computer. Which I will be picking up tomorrow.

Any thoughts or suggestions guys?

Thanks!

EDIT:
Resolved:

Docsis 3.0 is more sensitive to signal issues. Switching to the Docsis 3 modem was when the issues started - other things happened around the same time so pinning it down was tricky.

Currently switched back to a 2.0 modem which is working fine - have a tech coming out to check the cabling.

Great Scott

The router you bought (the Netgear) is likely limited to a certain number of TCP connections at a time. It's also possible that something is going on with your ISP, even maybe outside your house.

You should do additional testing to make sure: Assuming your Virus Scanner and Malwarebytes are up to date, and you have a Firewall turned on (the built-in Windows one is fine for a short test), I would connect your PC directly to the Motorola Cable Modem and see what happens.

If it works, your router is an issue.
If it doesn't, your ISP has some kind of problem.

Let me know what you find!

TheKoolEagle

I would also recommend maybe trying to do some traceroutes or ping tests when these issues come into play. As Great Scott said, the ISP may be at fault here, after storms/when they feel like it ISPs will go out and do maintenance on their nodelines, usually redirecting traffic. If they didn't switch a node back to the way it was supposed to it could be giving you problems, Comcast did this to my business about 2 years ago and made our connection a living hell.

Try running pingplotter (free traceroute application) and have it ping google.com for the day, it may turn up a node as the problem child. Alternatively your ISP may be throwing up a red flag on your network for some reason, basically throttling your connection down to nothing, I've seen this happen before with streaming applications, its really silly but it can happen.

Mugaaz

Snap judgement - It sounds like your throttling yourself, or your ISP is. Since you're able to stream / torrent fine, I'd say its you, and that you are throttling your own connection with the stream/torrent. If it was something else you'd have other issues in addition to this. You can fix it with QoS, but if you're streaming video it will be preferred traffic over regular browsing unless you make major QoS changes. Honestly, I'd just rate limit your torrent software. For the video issue, I guess I don't get it. What else are you doing while streaming a video other than watching the video?

Hevach

Go to DSLreports.com and run a speed test. Should help pin down Mugaaz's theory. If your ISP is way off of their up-to speed, and even the best ones are all over the place on this, you just might not be able to do much more than stream a video. My charter connection at home can handle Netflix on the Wii, Netflix on the laptop, and porn on the desktop simultaneously, but the same service at work chugs if somebody has to download an antivirus update.

Aumni

Did some speed testing:

Without router (direct to modem):
Not streaming:
9257 Kb/s down and 2984 Kb/s
Streaming Netflix:
9221 Kb/s down and 593 Kb/s up.

With router:
Not Streaming:
7923 Kb/s down and 1639 Kb/s up
Streaming Netflix:
7599 Kb/s down and 1162 Kb/s up

There is one wireless computer on the network, but it's off currently. The user is my mother, who just looks up pictures of dogs. It's a decent spec'd machine that I just scanned for any malicious software.

So I'm at a little over 1.1 MB down with 350 KB up straight through the modem. Obviously I only did this test a few times and would need a much larger sample size as there is a large margin of uncertainty.

The latency jumped 8ms from 18 to 26ms and the up was nearly halved just plugging in the router. I'm surprised my down speed dropped so much as well, but while streaming I kind of expected the up to be a little higher with the router than without.

Mugaaz - I'm definitely throttling my connection, however it's taking much, much, much less to do so now than before. I had connections running a 1.2 megabytes down and would throttle them at 25 K up; during this I would still be able to game, or youtube while this was going on. Generally while streaming netflix/youtube I'd be on the forums here or Reddit without any issue. Now however I'm constantly getting timed out.

TheKoolEagle - Thank you for the suggestions, that's something that I had suspicions on and that Traceroute suggestion is a great next step.

I would like to point out that I mainly game now, and that's fine because it's a single task. I'm also not a very heavy user of streaming. I'm definitely nowhere close to the 250GB softcap Comcast has.

I'll keep you all updated.

Aumni

Resolved:

Docsis 3.0 is more sensitive to signal issues. Switching to the Docsis 3 modem was when the issues started - other things happened around the same time so pinning it down was tricky.

Currently switched back to a 2.0 modem which is working fine - have a tech coming out to check the cabling.