This problem has been a huge unsolvable mystery for me for a long time now so this is going to be a rather lengthy post. The problem began for me around the start of summer last year, and it came out of nowhere as I had already been living here for a year before that with perfectly stable internet. I have tried many times to figure out just what the problem is but I've always given up after getting nowhere or hitting dead ends. I've been in countless talks with both the ISP and the houseowners about it but never gotten anywhere. I'm trying once more now by coming to this place for help.
I live in a household with 3 homes in it. Me, a neighbor next to me and the houseowners themselves on the upper floor. It's the houseowners internet that I use. I am connected to it by a router of my own which is plugged into the wall with a "cat.5e" cable which connects to a similar cable in a room on the upper floor that goes into the houseowner's router.
To explain the problem a bit better, my connection will instantaneously drop out at seemingly random intervals. My connection speed doesn't slow down or anything beforehand, it's just instantly cut off. It will then take usually 2-3 minutes to reconnect to the internet, although some times it can take more like 5-10 minutes. This cutoff can happen every 10 minutes, every 20 minutes, some times every 60 minutes, or anything in between, or it'll mix it up a bit with taking 10 minutes one time, then 15, then 30, then maybe 10 again. Basically, it's unpredictable, and very frustrating. What I eventually came to notice was that within minutes of the houseowners arriving home from work or vacation or whatever (I can hear them driving up the driveway and slamming the outer door when they arrive), my connection would stop being stable. Whenever they're not here though, everything is perfectly fine. The nights are a bit weird. Some times my connection is stable during them, some times not. I don't think the houseowners are the kind to ever stay up past midnight, or maybe up to 1 am on weekends, so I assume the nights that it is stable they have turned everything off, and when it isn't, something is on and interfering with the connection. Also, they've said they haven't noticed the connection cutting off for them, but they barely use the internet themselves so I figure that they just aren't using it enough to notice. For someone like me however who plays online games and streams movies and such, it is very noticeable. As for the neighbor, I don't believe they have any effect on this at all. They've said they haven't noticed any issues, but it's hard to know if they just aren't noticing them, or if the issues really don't appear on their end at all.
I have tried to just get my own internet instead, but this ended up not being possible because of the unfavorable terrain to draw the necessary wires through. They'd need permission to dig through the neighbors lawns and it would be extremely costly, so it was out of the question.
Through our countless talks with the ISP we have tried many things. I tried connecting an ethernet cable directly from the wall into my computer, which gave me a connection, but it would still randomly drop out. This ruled out the possibility of my own router being at fault. We then moved on to the houseowner's router. Here they tried things like changing the IP addresses of various devices connected to it, going through the devices connected to it one by one to see if any of them were causing problems, and just turning all WiFi devices off and it still did not stop the random drops. Eventually the houseowners were sent a brand new router in case their current one was somehow defunct in an undetectable way, but the problems remained the same. The ISP wasn't of much help beyond this, they are clueless as to what the problem might be. It didn't help that we got a new person on the line every time we called them and couldn't get back to the previous person we talked to. This is as far as I've gotten in solving the puzzle from a networking perspective.
What I've also considered is that it might be an electrical issue, but I'm even more clueless in this field than I am in networking. I have noticed some oddities like when I turn off the fluorescent bathroom lamp (my computer is pretty close to the bathroom) my computer monitors will some times (not always) black out for a few seconds, and the speakers will disconnect for about 1 second. If I'm using headphones they will some times get disconnected and I have to replug them. I also have these wireless bluetooth earphones that will have a quick sound distortion when I turn that lamp off. This has never affected my internet connection however, it's just an observation I've made of some kind of weird electrical interference happening here, which has given me the idea that maybe there's a similar electrical interference with the houseowner's router that cuts off its connection, or makes it reboot itself or something like that...?
I really don't know. I'm just hoping someone here may have heard of something familiar and can give me something to go on. If I can't figure this out I'll just have to find some other place to move to but I really hope it doesn't have to come to that since this place is great for me in every way except for this obnoxious internet problem. If you need more or details or anything then ask away.
I live in a household with 3 homes in it. Me, a neighbor next to me and the houseowners themselves on the upper floor. It's the houseowners internet that I use. I am connected to it by a router of my own which is plugged into the wall with a "cat.5e" cable which connects to a similar cable in a room on the upper floor that goes into the houseowner's router.
To explain the problem a bit better, my connection will instantaneously drop out at seemingly random intervals. My connection speed doesn't slow down or anything beforehand, it's just instantly cut off. It will then take usually 2-3 minutes to reconnect to the internet, although some times it can take more like 5-10 minutes. This cutoff can happen every 10 minutes, every 20 minutes, some times every 60 minutes, or anything in between, or it'll mix it up a bit with taking 10 minutes one time, then 15, then 30, then maybe 10 again. Basically, it's unpredictable, and very frustrating. What I eventually came to notice was that within minutes of the houseowners arriving home from work or vacation or whatever (I can hear them driving up the driveway and slamming the outer door when they arrive), my connection would stop being stable. Whenever they're not here though, everything is perfectly fine. The nights are a bit weird. Some times my connection is stable during them, some times not. I don't think the houseowners are the kind to ever stay up past midnight, or maybe up to 1 am on weekends, so I assume the nights that it is stable they have turned everything off, and when it isn't, something is on and interfering with the connection. Also, they've said they haven't noticed the connection cutting off for them, but they barely use the internet themselves so I figure that they just aren't using it enough to notice. For someone like me however who plays online games and streams movies and such, it is very noticeable. As for the neighbor, I don't believe they have any effect on this at all. They've said they haven't noticed any issues, but it's hard to know if they just aren't noticing them, or if the issues really don't appear on their end at all.
I have tried to just get my own internet instead, but this ended up not being possible because of the unfavorable terrain to draw the necessary wires through. They'd need permission to dig through the neighbors lawns and it would be extremely costly, so it was out of the question.
Through our countless talks with the ISP we have tried many things. I tried connecting an ethernet cable directly from the wall into my computer, which gave me a connection, but it would still randomly drop out. This ruled out the possibility of my own router being at fault. We then moved on to the houseowner's router. Here they tried things like changing the IP addresses of various devices connected to it, going through the devices connected to it one by one to see if any of them were causing problems, and just turning all WiFi devices off and it still did not stop the random drops. Eventually the houseowners were sent a brand new router in case their current one was somehow defunct in an undetectable way, but the problems remained the same. The ISP wasn't of much help beyond this, they are clueless as to what the problem might be. It didn't help that we got a new person on the line every time we called them and couldn't get back to the previous person we talked to. This is as far as I've gotten in solving the puzzle from a networking perspective.
What I've also considered is that it might be an electrical issue, but I'm even more clueless in this field than I am in networking. I have noticed some oddities like when I turn off the fluorescent bathroom lamp (my computer is pretty close to the bathroom) my computer monitors will some times (not always) black out for a few seconds, and the speakers will disconnect for about 1 second. If I'm using headphones they will some times get disconnected and I have to replug them. I also have these wireless bluetooth earphones that will have a quick sound distortion when I turn that lamp off. This has never affected my internet connection however, it's just an observation I've made of some kind of weird electrical interference happening here, which has given me the idea that maybe there's a similar electrical interference with the houseowner's router that cuts off its connection, or makes it reboot itself or something like that...?
I really don't know. I'm just hoping someone here may have heard of something familiar and can give me something to go on. If I can't figure this out I'll just have to find some other place to move to but I really hope it doesn't have to come to that since this place is great for me in every way except for this obnoxious internet problem. If you need more or details or anything then ask away.
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