Question Intermittent Internet Issue (Wi-Fi and Ethernet)

[OffensiveBias]

Tom's Hardware friends,

I am having an issue I can't explain with my internet. It started roughly a week and a half to 2 weeks ago (for the sake of easiness, we will just say this month). I initially have always had Wi-Fi on my desktop at this house because the fiber access point is the bottom floor of my tri-level townhouse near the back door. My desktop is on the top floor toward the front of my house. Between the router and Wi-Fi extender that is up here, I have very seldom have problems. When this issue started, the Wi-Fi would be fine for lets say an hour and then it was as though the connection dropped off. It wasn't off completely, but it dropped by about 80% speed (approximately, say, 300 mb/s to 60 mb/s). At first, I had success simply restarting the computer and it would be fine. After about a week, that stopped working and it become somewhat hit or miss. I had tried resetting the router multiple times throughout this process, to clarify. After that, I did the smartest thing I thought I could do: invest in a 100 ft Cat 6 cable. I got that today hooked it up, did the cable management to make it not ugly going through 2 floors, and all SEEMED well. Speed tests shot up (~900 mb/s), really had no issues that I noticed, at least at first. Later on, after gaming with some friends, I decided to watch some YouTube. With gig internet, that should never be a problem. Yet, I have struggled HEAVILY to buffer 1080p videos. I verified on another streaming website to confirm it was not just that single website. I also had some issues loading my gmail at times. I also noticed that while downloading the newest NVIDIA driver, it would download extremely quickly (in the dozens of mb/s) and rapidly drop down to about ten percent of that or even less (200 kb/s was the lowest). It would then go up again and down again. Extremely inconsistent. Suffice to say, I think it is either a Windows or a hardware issue. Now, my specs:

EVGA GeForce 2080 Ti
1000W Power Supply 80 Plus Gold (sorry, don't recall the make/model)
MoBo: Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Pro WiFi
Processor: Intel i7-9700K
32GB HyperX 3200 MHz DDR4 RAM
OS SSD: WD Black NVME 500 GB
Other Storage: WD Blue Sata 2TB SSD

ISP: Verizon
Router Model: G3100; Extender: E3200 (Both Verizon)
Devices on Network: Desktop, laptop, Fire Stick, cell phone, printer, Nintendo Switch

Thanks in advance! If I missed something I needed to provide, please let me know!

 

[PassMark]

Wifi is never very stable. Especially with repeaters.
But Ethernet should be. So problem might be with your ISP. Does the problem happen more often in busy periods (evenings) and less often very early morning?

 

[OffensiveBias]

Wifi is never very stable. Especially with repeaters.
But Ethernet should be. So problem might be with your ISP. Does the problem happen more often in busy periods (evenings) and less often very early morning?

At the moment, the Wi-Fi is more reliable than the Ethernet for streaming videos, but I haven't had any issues with gaming.

To touch on your time question, it is currently 12:30 Eastern, so theoretically not a busy time. I immediately had the same issue as yesterday evening. I can collect more data through observation over the holiday weekend, but at the moment it does not seem like that is the case.

 

[OffensiveBias]

Did a couple more tests:

1. Brought my laptop into the same room. With Wi-Fi, watched a portion of the same video. No issues whatsoever.
2. Disconnected from Wi-Fi on laptop, plugged the ethernet in. Seemed to work fine, but buffered noticeably less.

I then saw that the laptop was behind on a Windows update. I repeated the same two tests above.

There did not seem to be the same issue.

 

[OffensiveBias]

It's midnight, still having the same issue.

Also, tried moving which port the cable is in on the router, no change.

Did some assorted Tracerouts, seems there is quite a bit of packet loss (for YouTube, 9 out of 23 hops).

Watched plenty of stuff on my laptop on the Wi-Fi with absolutely no issues at all. Also played multiplayer games and downloaded a 40gb game on my desktop with no problems; in fact the game download was faster than it has been before.

 

[OffensiveBias]

Update:

Called Verizon, explained the situation and everything I had done up to now.

The tech was very smart and immediately tried something that appears to be working.

What she explained to me is that Verizon has had issues with their most recent firmware update with some IPv6 things. So, she disabled that, and almost immediately I've had no more problems.

 

[bill001g]

You would be surprised by the number of people that get their problem resolved by turning off ipv6 support. The ISP must be a bunch of idiots lately. Its not like IPv6 is new it has been around for 20 years.
It still is pretty much worthless but you know it is "new and improved" and has a higher number than IPv4 so it must be better