Question Wired Ethernet Connection Suddenly Dropping

[simadown]

Hi All,

I have a frustrating issue at the moment. I have Virgin Gigabit fibre installed, which I've had for around 3 years and could count on one hand the number of issues I've encountered over that time. Solid speeds and very few outages.

My setup is (and has been for years) the consumer router from Virgin (HomeHub 5) is in modem mode and is connected via the 2.5gig port to an Orbi mesh network. From the base Orbi router I have various ethernets connected, but one is wired (via 10gig cat7) to my home office. I have a netgear ethernet switch in the office, which links up to my desktop.

I get solid speeds 900mb-1gb. However, recently my ethernet connection just keeps dropping, on, off, on, off and continues for a couple of cycles. Stays connected for a long period and it happens again randomly. This also affects my work laptop that also has a wired connection via a dock and follows the same connection path.

When normal web browsing, doesn't affect much. When I'm gaming or in work Teams calls, however, it becomes a real pain!

I'm convinced it's something that's happening outside of the house, some interference or maybe too many people sharing the connection from the distribution box. I get no visual signs of drops on either the HomeHub or my Orbi mesh network.

Has anybody encountered something similar before, if not, could somebody assist me in the best way to troubleshoot this issue before I reach out to Virgin?

Thanks!

 

[bill001g]

If you are running 10gbit ports you need very high quality cables and there are massive numbers of fake cables on the market. You really shouldn't use cat7 for 10gbit you should use cat6a. Mostly because cat7 was never fully certified. They key reason cat7 never was certified is cat6a also run 10gbit and costs much less because of all the shielding required by cat7. A cat7 cable is really expensive to make so most you find and not really cat7 cables.

In any case it might not be that cable it but it could be other cables in your house.

So the first test before you go to lots of trouble looking at your cables and switches for the problem is leave a constant ping run to the router IP. When you see problems check to see if you see packet loss. Be sure to test with a ethernet connected device that is connected to the main router even if it passes switches. You do not want to use wifi of any kind in the path including any wifi that is used to connected between the router and the remote orbi nodes.

So if you get no loss to your router then the problem is likely outside your house.

You can leave a constant ping run to 8.8.8.8. That should show if you have actual network loss or it is some strange application related thing.

If you do see loss then the next step it to convince the ISP to fix it. They will of course blame google (ie 8.8.8.8). What you want to do before you call them is run tracert 8.8.8.8. Then run the ping tests to hop 2 which should be the first ISP router. To get in front of the ISP script also run ping to your router IP at the same time. That way you can show there is no issue inside your house but as soon as you leave you see errors.

If the loss is not in hop 2 or hop 2 does not respond to ping it is going to get a bit more complex to prove to the ISP. This really is the ISP job and is likely some cable issue outside your house but unless you get a good tech when you call you are best off doing as much of their job as you can for them or you will be rebooting your pc and router over and over to make them happy when it is not going to do anything.