[SOLVED] Random Drops

[AzureDragon89]

Hey all so im in a new apartment its been a solid month working with the ISP but they have given up or don't care some background info on the setup

the building itself is a year old im the first person to rent this unit. the internet is included with rent it's rated at 500Mbps both ways and I do get those speeds when i run a speed test with a ping of 1 or zero the isp is Called CityNET I was told its Fiber internet


the way the building is setup my unit has no modem only a router the router provided by the isp is a ZyXEL EMG3425-Q10A the isp controls it I have no access to it past the login page at 192.168.1.1
there is a CAT5e cable coming out of the wall in my pantry that is connected to a "data" room my router hooks up to this cable to provide internet to my unit the router is then connected to a 2nd cat5e cable that leads to a wall plate to my living room that my own personal CAT cable can connect to


i have a 5 port switch connected to this outlet with a cat 6 cable connected to the switch is my smart TV and two Desktop computers all CAT6 cables



The issue at random points threw out the day happens about 3-5 times a week i get drops in connection the internet goes down for about 1-2 Min just enough of a hiccup in connection where discord spotify twitch ETC says you have no connection then its back up its enough of a hicup to cause me to be booted from game servers or even have to log off and back into an app on my smart TV to resume watching something ALL devices disconnect its not a single device and its both wifi and wired connections

when this happens the lights on the router don't change the internet globe is still on and the wifi lights are also on this has gotten very annoying


steps taken so far to fix the issue with no results


Re installed windows on all my PCs - just incase
Replaced or RESET all smart devices in my home doing the setup process all over for each device
the ISP did a new drop from the "data" room to my unit with a new CAT5e cable
I have personally replaced my 5 port switch with a new one and replaced all my CAT6 cables with new ones
we have done multiple router Swap outs the issue happens with my NETGEAR NightHawk and with the ISP provided routers


The ISP says at this point its something in my unit causing the issues and its not their problem they only support up to the router anything past the router is my problem


any help is appreciated thank you all for reading this long-winded post

 

[bill001g]

Although the ISP likely doesn't want you to do it what happens if you remove their router and hook a pc directly to the incoming cable. You could likley just connect the cable going into the router port into the other wall jack bypassing the router. I would try just a single device and see if it works. It all depends on if they are attempting to lock mac addresses but I suspect they are not. In the long run you do not want it connected this way because other tenants in the apartments would be on the same network. It is used to eliminate the router as the cause.

I bet they are having some issue with the actual internet connection.

What you might try to prove this is run a tracert to 8.8.8.8

The first hop will be the router in your house. The second hop would be the router that runs all the apartments and the third hop would be the actual internet connection at the ISP office. You would want to leave constant ping run to these three hops. I am going to bet the first 2 hops have no issues and the third will show a outage.

This should be good enough to prove it is not the router in your place or your equipment.

 

[AzureDragon89]

Although the ISP likely doesn't want you to do it what happens if you remove their router and hook a pc directly to the incoming cable. You could likley just connect the cable going into the router port into the other wall jack bypassing the router. I would try just a single device and see if it works. It all depends on if they are attempting to lock mac addresses but I suspect they are not. In the long run you do not want it connected this way because other tenants in the apartments would be on the same network. It is used to eliminate the router as the cause.

I bet they are having some issue with the actual internet connection.

What you might try to prove this is run a tracert to 8.8.8.8

The first hop will be the router in your house. The second hop would be the router that runs all the apartments and the third hop would be the actual internet connection at the ISP office. You would want to leave constant ping run to these three hops. I am going to bet the first 2 hops have no issues and the third will show a outage.

This should be good enough to prove it is not the router in your place or your equipment.

I just did the traceroute the time out happened on hop 6 then hop 7 was Google-level3-60G.WashingtonDC.Level3.net then two more hops then google dns 8.8.8.8

 

[bill001g]

tracert you would have to run a real lot to see useful information. it does not run enough data to give good results. Leaving a constant ping run to multiple addresses tends to better to find intermittent issues. You could try pingplotter but it is very easy to misread the results and the ISP will not understand where simple ping commands they will.

If you are really having issue far into the internet you will never get it fixed. It is very unlikely though that that is a real result especially if you are only using tracert to find it.

 

[AzureDragon89]

after looking at some stuff looks like the issues is a DNS proxy the router " that i dont have access to its settings" is coming up as a proxy DNS this I think is causing the drops as the lights on the router never actually show my connection drops and the issues are so short lived that im starting to think this is the cause


also when running CMD ipconfig /all it also confirms that my DNS is coming up as 192.168.1.1 when i called the isp to ask what the dns is supposed to be they told me they don't give out that info.

 

[bill001g]

If it is DNS then that is easy. Just put whatever you want directly into the PC network settings. I can't see the advantage to the router proxy dns is so fast anyway. Might as well disable IPv6 while you are there since that too causes strange issues.

I like 1.1.1.1 because chrome and I think firefox both now run encrypted DNS. I think 8.8.8.8 (google) does also but they had disabled it for some time. Either works very well and is very stable for DNS. Your machine will directly talk to the DNS server and these IP are actually duplicated in many locations so you get less than 10ms ping times to them for most people.

Now be aware from what you initially describe it is not likely DNS. Things like discord, twitch etc only look up the dns name when the session is first opened. After that it uses the IP and even for many web sites there is a small dns cache kept by the web browsers. The DNS server could be down and it would continue to function until it needs to look up a IP again.