I'm recently moved into a new apartment and have had a real pain with my home internet connection. The basic problem is that I can connect to the internet but will intermittently disconnect for a few seconds at a time. My devices won't actually show that I've lost connection but it's significant enough for a poker site to time out or for a browser to get stuck loading the next webpage it was about to go to. A few notes for basic troubleshooting that I've already exhausted:

1) The problem is the same on both ethernet and wifi
2) The problem is the same across multiple computers / devices
3) I've had a cable technician check online and come into the apartment - they were unable to find any signal interruptions or packet loss
4) I've used 3 different modems (router built in) and replaced the coaxial cables once as well
5) Other units in the building are using the same provider and not having connection issues

I've been using a portable MiFi from another provider in the meantime but I can't keep paying for mobile data...any ideas?

Thanks!

Can you view modem signal information on a web interface for the modem/router? It will indicate channels, modulation, signal power, SNR, etc. If you just keep that page loaded (and assuming it refreshes in real time or can be refreshed on demand), you may be able to catch a brief drop in connection or decreased signal quality during one of the brief disconnects.

Have you replaced all cables (coaxial and Ethernet) that are inside your apartment? I'm not necessarily saying that you should; just trying to rule that out.

If we can assume that at least 1 of the modems was working perfectly and had fresh/no special configuration, you replaced all cabling, you don't have any other devices in between (like a switch or a VPN or something) and the rest of the statements you made in your post, then I can't see it being anything that is your responsibility within your apartment.

I guess the best I can say at this point is to try to catch a dip in signal quality per above and/or run a continuous ping to something very reliable (e.g. google.com) to be able to show your ISP that you are experiencing packet loss. You can save the ping command output to a txt file http://superuser.com/questions/19692...in-a-text-file

First thing to do is find out where the disconnects are happening... this could be either at the computer, the router or the ISP.

Easiest way to do this is to bring up 2 command prompts and run a continuous ping on each, one to somewhere on the internet and one to the router itself. In one of the command prompts type ping -t 8.8.8.8 in the other type ping -t ip-address-of-your-router.

When the internet stops responding, look at the 2 command prompts and see what they say. If you have time whilst the internet is down, bring up a third command prompt and type tracert 8.8.8.8 this should also help define where the failure occurs.

I don't have my modem login info at the moment, so I tried the continuous ping just now. I had ipoker running in the background because my client there will log me out if I'm not able to maintain connection with their server. I noticed random spikes in ping times like you can see below:



These didn't really time up with when I was getting disconnected though, so the 3rd or 4th time that ipoker logged me out I ran tracert 8.8.8.8 and got this:



As I was typing this there were 2 single line timeouts from pinging google's servers and one simultaneous timeout with my router (there were no other router timeouts). Hope this helps...

This may not be a helpful post, but do you happen to be in Canada with Rogers internet? I was googling to try to find out why all of those intermediate hops on the tracert are evaluating as INTEL_CE_LINUX (never saw that before) and most of the results are people with Rogers internet complaining of delays and/or drops from this year.

It could be completely normal behavior of your router or Rogers' DNS servers and I've just never seen it, but I figured it was worth mentioning.

It looks to me like your router is having problems... when you run a continuous ping to your local router you should see a fairly stable response time of around 1ms. You certainly shouldn't be seeing response times of 40 - 100ms. If data is having problems getting to / from your router, then obviously any onward travel would be problematic.

The first thing I'd normally recommend is to try a different router, but you've already done that...

Are there any other devices connected to your router? Try disconnecting all of them and run the ping to your local router... ? any difference?

Hah, before you mentioned this I had never noticed that other customers were having the same problem. I'm with Rogers yeah, and I found a LOT of complaints just now about my exact router's model having instability issues. Despite using 3 different routers, they were all the same model, so I'm going to request a different brand and see if that helps.

Seems like that settled it, thanks for the help guys! Rogers customers - avoid the hitron cgn3...