[SOLVED] What's wrong with my internet!!!

[sophiapeters413]

We have a Virgin Hub 3. My internet connection is fine, and then sometimes my ping will spike massively, from around 30 (in an online game) to 1000+, then go back down to 40. It will spike multiple times for up to an hour and then calm down as if nothing happened.
I've done a ping test (ping -t 8.8.8.8) and this is what I get in a typical situation when this is occurring.

https://imgur.com/a/58OEcTX

View: https://imgur.com/a/58OEcTX

When I look up what 'request timed out' is, it says its a firewall issue but then surely I'd get that response every time. How come sometimes it pings normally and sometimes it times out???
This has been going on for years and all Virgin have to say is it's a range issue. It can't be since there is a laptop connected directly via ethernet into the router and that has issues with the connection dropping like this too. It happens on my PC, my phone, my dad's laptop.... please help me fix this, it's terrible.

 

[Ralston18]

Run and post the results of "tracert 8.8.8.8" and also "ipconfig /all" via your computer.

 

[sophiapeters413]

Run and post the results of "tracert 8.8.8.8" and also "ipconfig /all" via your computer.

Sorry for the very late reply.
tracert results:

https://imgur.com/a/mW6yYZS

View: https://imgur.com/a/mW6yYZS

ipconfig:

https://imgur.com/a/4bRWuVL

View: https://imgur.com/a/4bRWuVL

For the wireless LAN adapter, I changed DNS servers to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, but I am currently and pretty much always connected via ethernet. Is it worth changing my ethernet DNS servers to those as well?

 

[bill001g]

Dns is not your issue since you are ping by ip address. Still I always use a fixed IP address in my pc. The default is to use the router as a proxy and that has issues on many router randomly. Also you do not really want to use your ISP DNS most do a poor job or worse have junk that does stuff like redirect unknown to advertising pages.

Tracert is a nice tool but a very stupid tool. It does not send enough data to find intermittent problems.

You can use a tool like pathping but doing ping manually tends to be less confusing.

It is unfortunate you ISP has hop2 configured to not not respond.

In any case what you do is open a bunch of cmd windows. You want to leave constant ping run to hops in the path. Your goal is to find the hop that the problem first occurs in. If it is hop1 it is your router or something in your house causing it. Hop 2 represents the connection between your house and the ISP but they have it rigged to not respond. So you try hop3 and so on until you find the random loss. The farther from your house the more likely the ISP is not be able to fix it. It may not even be in their network.

 

[sophiapeters413]

Dns is not your issue since you are ping by ip address. Still I always use a fixed IP address in my pc. The default is to use the router as a proxy and that has issues on many router randomly. Also you do not really want to use your ISP DNS most do a poor job or worse have junk that does stuff like redirect unknown to advertising pages.

Tracert is a nice tool but a very stupid tool. It does not send enough data to find intermittent problems.

You can use a tool like pathping but doing ping manually tends to be less confusing.

It is unfortunate you ISP has hop2 configured to not not respond.

In any case what you do is open a bunch of cmd windows. You want to leave constant ping run to hops in the path. Your goal is to find the hop that the problem first occurs in. If it is hop1 it is your router or something in your house causing it. Hop 2 represents the connection between your house and the ISP but they have it rigged to not respond. So you try hop3 and so on until you find the random loss. The farther from your house the more likely the ISP is not be able to fix it. It may not even be in their network.

So if the issue was in hop2 or hop4 I wouldn't be able to see it as I can't ping to those hops?

 

[sophiapeters413]

Dns is not your issue since you are ping by ip address. Still I always use a fixed IP address in my pc. The default is to use the router as a proxy and that has issues on many router randomly. Also you do not really want to use your ISP DNS most do a poor job or worse have junk that does stuff like redirect unknown to advertising pages.

Tracert is a nice tool but a very stupid tool. It does not send enough data to find intermittent problems.

You can use a tool like pathping but doing ping manually tends to be less confusing.

It is unfortunate you ISP has hop2 configured to not not respond.

In any case what you do is open a bunch of cmd windows. You want to leave constant ping run to hops in the path. Your goal is to find the hop that the problem first occurs in. If it is hop1 it is your router or something in your house causing it. Hop 2 represents the connection between your house and the ISP but they have it rigged to not respond. So you try hop3 and so on until you find the random loss. The farther from your house the more likely the ISP is not be able to fix it. It may not even be in their network.

Hmmm, I left it running for about 30 mins, and I found the results of pinging to each hop were consistent with each other, ie if one had high ping at one point, the others would also have high ping at the same point. I was playing an online game at the same time as doing this and I noticed very high ping at random intervals while playing - most likely this 1000ms spike as well as some other ones around 300ms not shown in the picture.

This picture shows all the cmd prompts pinging to the different hops. I couldn't ping to hop2/4 so I left gaps for those, but as you can see, at one point they all had a large ping in the 1000/2000 range. For some reason, pinging to hop8 timed out every single time.

https://imgur.com/a/tBOVG7c

View: https://imgur.com/a/tBOVG7c

Because the high ping spike occurred in hop1 and then seemingly carried over to the other hops, does that mean the issue is with my router?

 

[Ralston18]

Per ipconfig /all - it appears that your computer has both wired and wireless adapters enabled.

Respective DHCP IP addresses being 192.168.0.75 and 192.168.0.57

For most home computers it should be one adapter or the other - not both at the same time.

 

[sophiapeters413]

Per ipconfig /all - it appears that your computer has both wired and wireless adapters enabled.

Respective DHCP IP addresses being 192.168.0.75 and 192.168.0.57

For most home computers it should be one adapter or the other - not both at the same time.

Is that an issue? Could it cause high ping spikes? How can i turn the wireless one off?

 

[Ketchup79]

I think this review summed it up pretty well:
"If you're stuck with the Hub 3 it's not the end of the world. It does the job, in a very basic sort of way, although you may not be getting the full benefit of your superfast Virgin fibre connection. We'd strongly recommend that Virgin customers save up for a replacement router though: you'll get more features, almost certainly better performance and a more pleasant overall experience. "
https://www.expertreviews.co.uk/wireless-routers/1407886/virgin-media-hub-3-review
Here is another:
https://www.techradar.com/reviews/virgin-media-super-hub-3

And yes, turn off your wifi. If you on Windows 10, just click on the notifications Window for options.

 

[sophiapeters413]

I think this review summed it up pretty well:
"If you're stuck with the Hub 3 it's not the end of the world. It does the job, in a very basic sort of way, although you may not be getting the full benefit of your superfast Virgin fibre connection. We'd strongly recommend that Virgin customers save up for a replacement router though: you'll get more features, almost certainly better performance and a more pleasant overall experience. "
https://www.expertreviews.co.uk/wireless-routers/1407886/virgin-media-hub-3-review
Here is another:
https://www.techradar.com/reviews/virgin-media-super-hub-3

And yes, turn off your wifi. If you on Windows 10, just click on the notifications Window for options.

The thing is, it is only a recent thing. It started happening a year ago, but before then there were no issues with the internet at all. Hopefully I can convince my parents to get a new router.