Question Ethernet keeps disconnecting... unless I turn on a VPN or switch to WiFi ?

[12Z3]

MOBO: MSI PRO B660M-A
OS: Windows 11

I've been having a very aggravating issue as I am working at home, I have not contacted my ISP about this issue yet. I have AT&T fiber, and it was working pretty well until recently, where it may have randomly disconnected like once a day, now it seems like every 3-4 minutes over Ethernet my internet disconnects for about 5 seconds then is able to reconnect, and I get the server not found message when connecting to websites. I was wondering if I was being throttled, so I turned on a VPN and it has been consistently stable, I have not once seen the server not found message. I recently connected through WIFI and I also did not experience issues. Is this just my device being throttled? I have not really had issues on any of my other devices except my PC,. I thought it could maybe be my Ethernet cable but I don't know, it's not that old and it hasn't given me any issues previously. Anyone have any suggestions?

 

[Lutfij]

You might want to check and see what your BIOS version for your motherboard is at this moment of time. See if the board has any BIOS updates pending. Would be a good idea to see if your OS is pending any updates. As for your ethernet, maybe see if uninstalling it from Device Manager and then manually reinstalling the Ethernet adapter's drivers in an elevated command, i.e, Right click installer>Run as Administrator.

 

[Ralston18]

And I will add the suggestion to try another known working (no disconnects) Ethernet cable.

Just as a matter of elimination.

Ethernet cables do not have to be old to fail.

 

[bill001g]

I am not so sure it is a ethernet cable or even a port issue. The vpn traffic uses the same connection.
It gets tricky to say what is different from a vpn connection and a HTTPS session so say google. They are very similar.

So I would first leave a constant ping run to your router IP. If that fails then it very well could be some kind of hardware issue.
Now I guess it depends on what you mean it goes down. Something like a page not found is very different than if you are watching netflix and it all the sudden disconnects. A couple things to change just because they cause strange issue even though it might not make a difference.

I would change you nic settings to use 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 as your dns server. You might also want to enable the encrypted DNS . The other things you can try is to disable IPv6 in the nic settings. IPv6 problems though tend to be something work and others do not. Almost nobody uses IPv6 so turning it off has no detrimental impact for most people.

You are going to have to do some more detailed testing with ping commands to see if you can find what is different between the vpn and non vpn methods of connecting.

 

[12Z3]

You might want to check and see what your BIOS version for your motherboard is at this moment of time. See if the board has any BIOS updates pending. Would be a good idea to see if your OS is pending any updates. As for your ethernet, maybe see if uninstalling it from Device Manager and then manually reinstalling the Ethernet adapter's drivers in an elevated command, i.e, Right click installer>Run as Administrator.

Updated BIOS, issue still seems to be present as well as re-enabling IPV6 (since it was already disabled apparently), tried a different ethernet cable to no avail and updating my windows.

 

[12Z3]

Can confirm, issue still persistent, tried changing adapter settings like turning off Green Ethernet and Power Saving mode, did not help. One strange thing is that I got an extension to detect when my internet goes down so I could show everyone, but it doesn't even register that my internet is offline, it claims that everything is fine despite consistently getting Server Not Found errors every few minutes

One thing I wanted to note as well is that my internet has not slowed at all, it is still the same as it was before, except with the disconnection issues.
I still can confirm that my VPN is preventing me from disconnecting, but that of course is not a permanent fix.

 

[Ralston18]

Look in Reliability History/Monitor and Event Viewer for any error codes, warnings, or even informational events being captured just before or at the time that any internet problems occur.

Reliability History is user friendly and the time line format may reveal some pattern.

Event Viewer requires more time and effort to navigate and understand.

To help with Event Viewer:

How To - How to use Windows 10 Event Viewer | Tom's Hardware Forum (tomshardware.com)

 

[12Z3]

Look in Reliability History/Monitor and Event Viewer for any error codes, warnings, or even informational events being captured just before or at the time that any internet problems occur.

Reliability History is user friendly and the time line format may reveal some pattern.

Event Viewer requires more time and effort to navigate and understand.

To help with Event Viewer:

How To - How to use Windows 10 Event Viewer | Tom's Hardware Forum (tomshardware.com)

I didn't see anything suspicious and I'm still having issues.

It's such a weird issue, when I DO lag, if I'm in a game it seems like everything is fine and playable, for the most part, if I'm in a voice call through discord my friends can hear me but I can't hear them, I've watched videos when it's happened and I believe the videos don't buffer but if I were to change pages it would.

Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 with WARP VPN also fixes the issue, restoring stability, but it's such a frustrating issue because I can't utilize the full speed of my internet without connecting because of the issue I'm having, I still have no idea why a VPN fixes the problem.

 

[bill001g]

Have you done the much simpler tests of leaving ping command run in background cmd windows. It could be that it is something strange in the ISP network to only certain locations.

Run tracert 1.1.1.1
This will not show much it is only to get the router IP in the path.

Now open 3 cmd windows and leave constant ping run to hop 1 (your router). Hop 2 (generally the ISP router outside your house). and the final address 1.1.1.1

You would see packet loss in hop1 if it is a ethernet port which is extremely rare. You also seldom see loss on hop 2 when it is a fiber connection. Fiber generally works or completely fails.

What you likely are going to find is all this shows no problems just like the other tool you ran but ping lets you verify each part of the connection. You could test to say the game server or discord if you want.

You have already tried the common IPv6 and dns tricks which makes me think it is some software on your machine that the vpn is bypassing. Not sure what but there is software that tries to accelerate "gaming" traffic or things like parental controls. VPN tends to bypass these because they use similar techniques to intercept traffic.

It would be really nice if you can see this problem with a ping command. You could then boot a linux image off a usb stick and do the same test. It would confirm that it was software or setting in windows.

If you get really desperate you could blindly reinstall windows but be sure to run the ping test first just in case it is a real network problem.

 

[Ralston18]

Take a look in Task Manager, Resource Monitor, and Process Explorer (Microsoft, free).

Use all three tools but only one tool at a time.

Compare what happens with respect to resources etc. between Ethernet and VPN.

What resources are being used, to what extent ( %), and what is using any given resource.

What, if anything, changes?

Look for processes that appear or disapear during the comparisons.

Process Explorer:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer