Need help with networking

[UltraFireFX]

I play League of Legends (among other games) with my brother and a friend in my town and we regularly talk in Skype during games (with me hosting due to me having the best PC).

A few months back our internet started to 'disconnect', at first I noticed some patterns as listed below:
- I can hear my brother fine in the call but my friend's voice gets distorted more and more before he drops from the call (due to me hosting, everything else on his side remains fine)
- My friend can hear us fine until we restart our router-modem.
- If we restarted our router-modem it fixed it but that may be due to the length of the boot time of our old router
- When we restart our new router-modem (XAC1900)(we were buying one anyway) it takes can take a while after it's been restarted to fix the issue but most of the time it's fixed by the time it gets online.
- In Source games we loose connection to the server before the call gets too bad.
- Occurs much more frequently at night and on the weekends.

Things we've done to attempt to fix/determine the cause:
- We've rung up Vodafone (our current ISP) who sent up a Chorus technician - he did a check on our lines and from the exchange to our Router was 'fine', I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't though because the internet wasn't out when he checked.
- Getting the new router seemed to make a difference looking back but it still occurred, especially on the week-end (when you'd want to be playing).

Any ideas on what we should go?

P.S. I'll post anything I've forgotten to mention here.

 

[boosted1g]

I would have advised you to not get another combo modem/router. In your case you got a high one but typically they are lackluster routers packaged with average modems. Then end result is nothing geared towards performance.
In your case I am not totally confident in Linksys having a quality modem product.

What is your internet speed, if your upload bandwidth is 1mbps or less then that alone could be your issue.
Otherwise it is either your router or your connection.
On your Linksys can you pull up modem logs to see power levels and see the modem logs, specifically if you have any t3 or t4 timeout errors?

 

[UltraFireFX]

I would have advised you to not get another combo modem/router. In your case you got a high one but typically they are lackluster routers packaged with average modems. Then end result is nothing geared towards performance.
In your case I am not totally confident in Linksys having a quality modem product.

The modem isn't in the router, the modem plugs into the modem which doubles as a power-pack but I'll heed your warning for the future.

What is your internet speed, if your upload bandwidth is 1mbps or less then that alone could be your issue.
Otherwise it is either your router or your connection.
On your Linksys can you pull up modem logs to see power levels and see the modem logs, specifically if you have any t3 or t4 timeout errors?

I just did a speed test on Speedtest.net, here's the results.

 

[boosted1g]

I see now, apparently there is a modem-router, and a router only model. My first search on took me to the modem-router model on Linksys own website.

What speeds are you paying for from your dsl provider?

One downside about DSL is that it has a quicker decline in signal speed the further you are from the hub, and quicker decline from heavier traffic (especially if your hub is overloaded which most of them are).

So when you say you reboot the router-modem do you reboot both or just the router?