I need help with a 8 month plague of requests timed outs!

[Davycrocket]

Hello all, I'd just like to start with a thank you for taking the time to read my post.

Before the start of this year, my internet has been fine. Since the start of this year, my internet has been plagued with request timeouts. These timeouts come at different hours of day (mostly during prime time hours though) and they can be anywhere from 1 to 3 timeouts at a time. 2 timeouts together is enough to lag any game or voice program we are using for at least 5 seconds. 3 timeouts disconnects us from any game/voice program we are using. They vary from happening 2 times a hour, 2 times every 10 mins, or 2 times every min. Every day can be different basically. They occur just as much at the start of the month as they do at the end of the month.

I have called my ISP several times over, (cable one) probably a total of 30 to 40 calls this year. At the start of the year my ISP said they could see the problem and would send a tech out but when the tech got here the morning after, the problem would not be happening anymore and he would leave because he could not detect a issue. This happened several times but while the techs were here at my home, they would find small issues with feedback and say it's fixed etc etc and then night comes and the problem is not fixed. We have done everything my ISP has asked of us, A brand new modem, Brand new coaxial cable wiring around the house, drilled a hole in my wall and ran a coaxial cable to go strictly to the modem (before this, we used a spliter and ran one end to my cable box, the other end to the modem in my room). I have changed ethernet cords. I have been told by my ISP that I need to upgrade my ethernet cord from a cat 5 to cat 6. I have been told by my ISP to plug my modem into a power strip that suppresses voltage because if plugged directly into a wall there could be power fluctuations.

Around 4 to 5 months into the year my ISP went from trying to fix my problems to blaming my timeouts on gaming severs (it's a little hard to believe this because when I get timeouts, it disconnects me from EVERYTHING, multiple different games, different chat programs, internet browser doesn't work when timeouts are occurring etc). When I explained this to the tech I was on the phone with he gave me a explanation saying "Picture a 2 lane road and your packets are traveling on this road, if there is a wreck on this road your packets get held up. So even if your internet is fine, even if the gaming servers are fine, other things will cause you to loose packets beyond our control."

So after waiting for a few months hoping this issue would fix itself, shockingly it has not. I called my ISP again last week and talked to another "tech" and he did notice the timeouts on my modem and said 500 timeouts for a week isn't good. His excuse when I told him it was mostly happening during the night hours was "It's very possible that people in my area are using up all the bandwidth allowed using netflix etc". He reset it and the problem stopped happening while I was on the phone with him so he basically ended the call (the problems continued shortly after he ended the call).


Information you guys may need

There are 2 gaming computers in this household both of which are connected via ethernet and one youtube/web surfing computer connected via wifi. We have tried unplugging every computer but one for each computer in the house, problem still persists. We have tried turning off wifi, problem still persists. I am constantly running two ping tests via command prompt, one to youtube or google or other websites, the other to my modem. I get more timeouts on the ping to websites (when this is happening games are lagging/disconnecting as well) but probably 30% of the time I get modem timeouts the same time I get website timeouts.

At this point I don't know of anything else I can do besides switch ISPs (a little difficult for me because I live in a small town dominated by this ISP, the only other option is AT&T with not even a third of the speed of my ISP).

Has anyone ever encountered my problem? Does anyone know of anything to do to try to pinpoint/fix my issue?

P.s Sorry for the wall of text.

 

[Davycrocket]

bump? 🙁

 

[USAFRet]

I had a very similar situation a few years ago with Cox cable.

Internet kept dying at night. Next day when the tech shows up, all is fine.
New coax cables throughout, new innards on the box on the corner, blah, blah...

Keep a detailed log of when it times out.
One day I had 3 service trucks and a supervisor out here checking things.
Turns out my issue was one of their boxes upstream, dying from temp and humidity. It got to where I could predict the signal loss to within 15 minutes.

Cluelessness by your ISP:
-upgrade my ethernet cord from a cat 5 to cat 6.
-plug my modem into a power strip that suppresses voltage because if plugged directly into a wall there could be power fluctuations
-It's very possible that people in my area are using up all the bandwidth

 

[bill001g]

Your post is a little hard to read but I am assuming you are in the cable modem/router and you are looking at the log messages. If you are seeing the modem disconnecting from the network then the ISP needs to fix it. You can search those messages and it will give you some indication what is happening but this really is something for the ISP to understand. Normally as long as you leave the power on you will have days worth of those message. You want to save copies for the clueless ISP.

Almost all disconnects like that are related to some kind of cabling issue. It can be in your house or pretty much anyplace up the street to the cable companies front end equipment. The ISP techs have expensive test meters that can find these issues. A good tech can find cable problems within minutes with this equipment.

Now if I misread your post and the cable modem itself never actually disconnects from the network but you are losing things like ping packets those are much hard to find. Problems like this are generally issue with the routers or gateways at the ISP and the field techs do not generally have access. The tech though does have contacts he can call that does....I just wish I could talk to those guys directly many times.

 

[Davycrocket]

I had a very similar situation a few years ago with Cox cable.

Internet kept dying at night. Next day when the tech shows up, all is fine.
New coax cables throughout, new innards on the box on the corner, blah, blah...

Keep a detailed log of when it times out.
One day I had 3 service trucks and a supervisor out here checking things.
Turns out my issue was one of their boxes upstream, dying from temp and humidity. It got to where I could predict the signal loss to within 15 minutes.

Cluelessness by your ISP:
-upgrade my ethernet cord from a cat 5 to cat 6.
-plug my modem into a power strip that suppresses voltage because if plugged directly into a wall there could be power fluctuations
-It's very possible that people in my area are using up all the bandwidth

I have been keeping a detailed report, It is completely random for sure, happens at different times every single day but does occur more often at night during prime time hours.

 

[Davycrocket]

Your post is a little hard to read but I am assuming you are in the cable modem/router and you are looking at the log messages. If you are seeing the modem disconnecting from the network then the ISP needs to fix it. You can search those messages and it will give you some indication what is happening but this really is something for the ISP to understand. Normally as long as you leave the power on you will have days worth of those message. You want to save copies for the clueless ISP.

Almost all disconnects like that are related to some kind of cabling issue. It can be in your house or pretty much anyplace up the street to the cable companies front end equipment. The ISP techs have expensive test meters that can find these issues. A good tech can find cable problems within minutes with this equipment.

Now if I misread your post and the cable modem itself never actually disconnects from the network but you are losing things like ping packets those are much hard to find. Problems like this are generally issue with the routers or gateways at the ISP and the field techs do not generally have access. The tech though does have contacts he can call that does....I just wish I could talk to those guys directly many times.

I am using two different command prompts to ping my modem and a popular website. The time out requests are from the command prompt.

 

[bill001g]

You need to ping your modem and the first ISP router you find in a tracert. The ISP will always say the problem is in another ISP or maybe the server you are pinging.

In most cases you will see outages in the ping to the first ISP router. This also represent the connection to your house and you most times will see corresponding disconnections in the modems log. This type of outage tends to be the only one the first level techs understand.

If the problem is farther into the trace you will have massive problems getting the ISP to fix it. In some cases it is another ISP network and even if it is their network you are going to have to have a very senior tech that has access to these devices in their network to test.