Question Something interferes with my home internet connection and I can't figure out what it is or what to do ?

[Sentient0000]

Here's the story. I had a simple ADSL at home and it worked fine. Upgraded to FTTC at the end of last year, and it worked fine.

Then, around the time they started installing full FTTH cables in the street, maybe a month or two ago, my connection started having hiccups. Speed tests would show nothing strange, still reaching the usual speeds, but web pages would fail to load half of the times. The page would just not display anything as the icon would do its animation, indicating a loading in progress, and then I'd get the message in the browser that the page failed to load, and the button to try again. When it does load, sometimes it's still slow, loading in pieces, and sometimes the page layout would be broken because it wouldn't load all of it correctly.

I tried different browsers, still happens. I tried both wired and wireless connection, still happens.

Then we finally upgraded from FTTC to FTTH. Speed tests show that speed went up 10 times, hitting now as high as 800Mbps, but the problem still remains. Happens in online gaming too.

So now I tried to use the hotspot connection from my phone to my computer, and even if the speed test shows max 40Mbps, pages load fast and I haven't gotten any failed loading so far. So it's definitely my home connection.

What the hell can I do about this? It's driving me mad. I called my provider (WindTre, in Italy) and they are utterly useless as to be expected.

I would appreciate any help.

 

[bill001g]

Start by running a constant ping to some IP like 8.8.8.8

What you want to see is if you are getting packet loss. Fiber connections seldom have issues since they are almost imune to weather conditions and signal interference. But all it takes is a very tiny crack in a fiber and you will get packet loss.

This could also be a DNS problem. Try to change the DNS in your pc ipv4 settings to 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1. While you are in there turn off the ipv6 support it can cause strange issues for some people.

 

[Sentient0000]

Thank you for your reply, and please bear with me if I'm not as tech savvy as I could be, yet. How do I go about running a constant ping to an IP? I'm running the continuous ping. I'll check for results when I experience issues.

Should I try one of these tests at the time or do all at once?

 

[bill001g]

They are independent. DNS is more of a server or router issue where ping detects networks outages. Many people like me always set the DNS to a large server provider like google or cloudflare rather than use the one from the ISP.

 

[Sentient0000]

So, I run the continuous ping and so far I didn't notice any particular loss of packets. I even stopped the ping right after the browser failed to load a page to see if I had just lost some packets, but it shows I didn't.

Next I'm gonna try to change the DNS to 8.8.8.8, but could you please explain to mean what that does? I'd like to understand at least a little what I'm doing.

 

[bill001g]

It is used to find the IP addresses used by a web site. A web site talks to many servers so if the DNS is not working correctly it can get some but not all the names. Speedtest works because it looks the speedtest site up and then transfers lots of data to that single IP without the need to lookup other IP.

By default your DNS uses your ISP server. The router also acts as a proxy. Both these can have issues.

 

[Sentient0000]

Hey I know this is 2 months late but I literally only got around to try changing the DNS yesterday (other real-life problems got in the way so I had neglect this internet problem for a long time), and I just want to say that it works!! No more failing to load the pages!! (even though for a 800-900 MBps fiber connection sometimes it seems just a tiny bit slow)
So I just wanted to say thank you for helping me out, my internet provider support service never even remotely pointed me in the right direction. Thank you

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Think of dns as a phone book for the internet. I think Google dns servers are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

Now if you want to be slick, you should be able to log into your Wi-Fi router, and under the connection settings you should be able to specify to it that those are the dns settings. If you do that to where that’s what your router uses, then all the devices that connect into your router should be using those.