My home network is unstable

Bobble

Moved into a new apartment a few months back and I've had trouble with my internet on a regular basis. On a nearly daily basis I have to reboot my modem and router when I get home from work, and frequently when I wake up in the morning if I decide to hop online then too. I never lose connection, everything is fine once I reboot. Same modem and router I had at my old apartment, where I went weeks/months without having to reboot at all. Service provider at both locations was/is Cox.

Would it have something to do with setting up the network again? I just plugged everything in once i got to the new place.

TheKoolEagle

I assume you have spoken with Cox about the issue? When you moved you talked to them about using the same modem right? My thought is if in the middle of the night they are doing some checks and your modem shows up as a red flag, they are killing your connection, then when you reboot the unit goes out and grabs another public IP and everything is happy until the next night.

I'm willing to bet if you were doing something online between the hours of midnight to 5am you would get an internet dropout in the middle of doing whatever you are doing.

Now the real challenge is convincing Cox there is an issue, most ISPs are fairly hard to convince of anything, but at the very least maybe they will swap modems out for you (this is usually the most common practice for ISPs if there is an issue)

Frei

Bobble wrote: »

Moved into a new apartment a few months back and I've had trouble with my internet on a regular basis. On a nearly daily basis I have to reboot my modem and router when I get home from work, and frequently when I wake up in the morning if I decide to hop online then too. I never lose connection, everything is fine once I reboot. Same modem and router I had at my old apartment, where I went weeks/months without having to reboot at all. Service provider at both locations was/is Cox.

Would it have something to do with setting up the network again? I just plugged everything in once i got to the new place.

Did you live at an apartment before? Connections often slow down in apartment complexes due to the sheer number of people using the same ISP in a very small area. I had the same issue when I lived in an apartment (Also with Cox). I never lost connection, but during peak hours, like before work and in the evening, it would be quite slow and a reboot of the modem is all that would help, but it'd still return. Nighttime was fine since not very many people were on.

Good luck convincing them to do anything other than send a technician and make sure it's nothing wrong on your end, though. They don't like to fix or replace their stuff.

Void Slayer

Are you using DSL or Cable?

Also can you access the modem and get the connection statistics?

They can be useful in figuring out the problem.

I know I had this problem on my home DSL when I first got it, I kept working on it going to multiple sites and eventually just bought my own modem/router combo instead of using the crappy one that came from my ISP and had to swap out some LAN cables and phone cables.

But we would need to know the modem type, connection type and then get details on what the connection looks like when it is up.

Something like this for ADSL.

Mode: T1.413
Type: Fast
Line Coding: Trellis On
Status: No Defect
Link Power State: L0

Downstream Upstream
SNR Margin (dB): 6.8 10.0
Attenuation (dB): 48.0 31.0
Output Power (dBm): 19.2 11.8
Attainable Rate (Kbps): 4608 976
Rate (Kbps): 4576 768
K (number of bytes in DMT frame): 144 25
R (number of check bytes in RS code word): 0 0
S (RS code word size in DMT frame): 1 1
D (interleaver depth): 0 0
Delay (msec): 0 0

Bobble

Thanks for the tips, guys. To answer the questions posed:
-Yes, I was in an apartment before. Went from one apartment to a different apartment complex. I haven't had any problems with speed, just connection loss when idle. Even in primetime the service is moving along just fine. It's just the need to reboot once or twice a day that's getting to me.
-It's a cable modem.
-After googling how to access the modem, I snooped around the info a bit (with zero knowledge of what the hell I'm doing. Woo amateur hour!) and the log appears to be a series of me rebooting the modem and it re-establishing the connection when I do. Looks like there was a big pile of repeated Synchronization failures last Monday night, but I've had problems connecting every morning, not just Tuesday morning.

Dhalphir

Cable companies generally don't like it when modems move around without them being specifically told about it, did you tell your cable company that you were using the same modem again, or did you just get the cable in the new apartment activated, plug the modem in and away you went?

nimrodblack

Dhalphir makes a good point above.

I would also ask COX about the cable modem itself. On a couple occasions my cable modem was reaching the End Of Life on their network. Some of the changes they were making would cause random disconnects requiring me to hard restart (power cycle) the modem to re-establish connections. This was Comcast but it is a simple question to ask them. And they should be able to tell you with little effort. You might be looking at needing a new modem.