Question Intermittent connection issues. ISP will not assist any further and I need assistance with what to do!

[BurritoSniper]

For the last few months I have been experiences intermittent connection issues on my home network and I need more ideas to try and test to see what the problem is. I am coming for help!

ISP: Spectrum (I know... but they're my only option)
Internet type: Cable internet
Modem: Spectrum Modem
Main router: Netgear RAXE300
Access point router 1: Asus RT-AX55
Access point router 2: Netgear R6700AX

A few months ago I started experiencing this issue out of nowhere. I play online games, and before this all started I was receiving good connection speeds and low ping.

All of a sudden I noticed my ping would increase in Game to almost an usable point at random intervals. Things would be good sometimes, and then at night I would randomly spike and disconnect intermittently. I first had spectrum come out and they replaced the main modem cable as they said the old one was faulty. This did not solve the issue.

I started looking into why my network might be failing inside the house. At the time I had all devices on one spectrum provided router (60 devices total including ethernet devices). This was obviously an issue! I started to address this problem about a week ago.

I replaced the spectrum router for something more beefy, and bought a few other small routers to help break up the load for my IOT devices around the house. I have since segmented my network by using 3 routers to properly space out my devices. Segmented bands so that my many IOT devices were on different routers and on the 2.4GHz band. I limited the amount of bandwidth the router was allowed to send on those bands. I left all my large devices connected to ethernet cables run through the house. I am also constantly monitoring what devices are connected on the network and do not see any weird devices taking up large percentages of bandwidth. If there is a device causing this issue, I am not skilled enough to find it.

No one router has more than the specified "Allowable devices" on it now. They all have less than 20 wireless devices connected to them.

For my PC (The device I ran the test I am about to share, I have it connected like this.) I will mention that the device is connected all the way through ethernet (CAT6 cable and above)
Main Router -> Ethernet (AP Router 1) -> Ethernet (PC)
From my PC I kept up a ping test back to the original router to ensure there wasn't a problem internally reaching the main router. I have never seen it drop below 1ms during my ping test.
To test my connection to the outside world I ran a constant ping test against www.google.com and www.facebook.com and found there is an issue. During certain times of the day, SOMETIMES, my connection will very drastically. From 20ms all the way up to 300ms.
Example: 24ms, 30ms, 40ms, 26ms, 60ms, 24ms, 160ms, 44ms, 26ms, 221ms, 266ms, 28ms, 35ms, 24ms, 118ms. <---- It spikes for one or two packets, but consistently. Definitely enough to momentarily disconnect me from any online game I'm trying to play.

My ISP will run connection test from their side and say "Hey speed test came back okay so there isn't an issue!" And yes the speed test generally come out okay, but it's the latency issues that are causing all my problems and it's like they don't know what that means. Also the fact that it works sometimes and not others really makes me suspicious that it's not my internal network.

I am going to buy an Ethernet cable tester to make sure that my cables are causing the random spikes between the Main Router and Modem, but past that I'm all out of ideas of how to figure out if anything on my side is causing the issue. I will post a screenshot of the ping test I ran to google where you can see what was happening. It also has my internal network speed test to verify that there is no issue reaching the router.

Please help! I am out of ideas and will take the time to understand and learn anything anyone would like to help with!

Thanks,
-An annoyed gamer

 

[dingo07]

So, simply, your PC is connected to LAN2 on the router, and an AP is connected to LAN1?

 

[bill001g]

It is not likely a issue with ethernet cables. Latency spikes are caused by data being held in a buffer. A ethernet cable itself is just wire and the delay is fixed at some fraction of the speed of light. Ethernet in general either has packets damaged and then discarded or they are good. You would see packet loss with a bad cable.

Wifi on the other hand holds data until it is transmitted/retransmitted without errors so you see delays like this. This is why you never play online gamse on wifi.

In any case anything inside your house would show up when you ping the router IP.

So next step is to try to find where outside your house the problem is. Run tracert 8.8.8.8. Now do ping tests to the various routers in the path. Pretty much you need to hope the problem is in hop 2. This for most people represents the connection between your house and the ISP. If the problem is in some hop far away it likely is in another ISP network.

Problem is even hop 2 is going to be hard to get the ISP to do anything. They barely promise bandwidth, latency they will pretty much ignore. If you were to get packet loss that they will fix since it generally is some kind of equipment or cable issue.

Random latency spikes almost always represent some overloaded connection/router/server. This type of issue even if the ISP would admit is extremely hard to get fixed because they have to upgrade stuff which might not be simple if they for example would have to run more fiber under the ground.

Although it tends to be rather uncommon with modern fast internet connection veryify that you are not using all your bandwidth. If someone were to upload or download large files while you were playing your data could be buffered behind that traffic. Used to be your neighbors kids running torrents could affecte everyone living nearby but that too is much more uncommon since the total bandwidth shared by you and your neighbors is massive now days.

 

[BurritoSniper]

It is not likely a issue with ethernet cables. Latency spikes are caused by data being held in a buffer. A ethernet cable itself is just wire and the delay is fixed at some fraction of the speed of light. Ethernet in general either has packets damaged and then discarded or they are good. You would see packet loss with a bad cable.

Wifi on the other hand holds data until it is transmitted/retransmitted without errors so you see delays like this. This is why you never play online gamse on wifi.

In any case anything inside your house would show up when you ping the router IP.

So next step is to try to find where outside your house the problem is. Run tracert 8.8.8.8. Now do ping tests to the various routers in the path. Pretty much you need to hope the problem is in hop 2. This for most people represents the connection between your house and the ISP. If the problem is in some hop far away it likely is in another ISP network.

Problem is even hop 2 is going to be hard to get the ISP to do anything. They barely promise bandwidth, latency they will pretty much ignore. If you were to get packet loss that they will fix since it generally is some kind of equipment or cable issue.

Random latency spikes almost always represent some overloaded connection/router/server. This type of issue even if the ISP would admit is extremely hard to get fixed because they have to upgrade stuff which might not be simple if they for example would have to run more fiber under the ground.

Although it tends to be rather uncommon with modern fast internet connection veryify that you are not using all your bandwidth. If someone were to upload or download large files while you were playing your data could be buffered behind that traffic. Used to be your neighbors kids running torrents could affecte everyone living nearby but that too is much more uncommon since the total bandwidth shared by you and your neighbors is massive now days.

This has been a very insightful paragraph! I did not know I was able to do that but I will check where the connection issue takes place on that tracert path. I can't do it now, as unfortunately everything is back to normal and I'm reading solid and consistent ping. The issue only starts up at night most of the time.

I don't believe it's anything in my network bandwidth wise, I asked people inside to stop using the internet while I ran the initial ping test to google. I checked that internal ping test and made sure the devices were only loaded with what they could handle. My router also reports device usage although it doesn't seem super accurate. Didn't look like an issue though but maybe I am just not performing the right test.

It sounds silly but maybe the houses around me are using too much bandwidth at night for the network structure out here! I also want to mention it's cable, I wish we had fiber. I will post back when I am able to run the tracert test under the fault conditions.

Thanks,
A Hopeful Gamer

 

[bill001g]

So most cable companies have moved to docsis 3.1. This means the shared bandwidth is 10gbit download and 1gbit up. It is still extremely uncommon to offer more than 1gbit download plans so it would take say 10 stupid kids running torrent at the same time.

Previously systems only had 1gbit of download bandwidth total. They would offer 300 or 500 gbit plans so it did take as many users to use the total bandwidth. The ISP seldom would do anything even when they knew abuse was happening. Now 20 years ago when the total bandwidth was under 100mbps it was very easy to exceed even accidentally the total bandwidth and the ISP policed it much more.