[SOLVED] Wired internet drops outs limited to WAN not LAN?

[AlastairCarter123]

Hi, first time post so apologies if I've missed any details here.

I'm hard-wired into the back of our BT Bussiness Hub 1 via an ethernet patch to USB adapter that I've tested (+ the testing wires). There is a switch that connects to other wired devices on our network (Sonos, BT whole home, CCTV) but I am currently plugged directly into the router.

I've been having trouble with the internet for some time, experiencing intermittent dropouts with my PC still being connected to the Hub but not the internet. It will typically self-resolve in 5 mins or so and I can sometimes swap to our meshing WiFi (BT whole home, 5 disks in the house)/hub WiFi to regain connectivity.

I've checked things on the PC end (DNS servers, flushing the cache, network adapter reset, checking drivers and rewiring the patch socket since it seemed to be a little old) but I still seem to experience disconnections. I also rang BT who said our line was working perfectly, they did a reset at the exchange but that didn't seem to do anything. I've replaced the ASDL filter just in case.

This leads me to wonder if the BT Whole Home disks (2 of which are also connected via ethernet) are interfering with hardwired devices, and if there is a way I can ensure my traffic never reaches the disks and only goes through the hub and out of the filter.

Or is it the hub CPU being overloaded due to there being a fair few devices on our network. I have considered separating the hub into a 3rd party modem + router. We also have a few older hubs lying around and I've been told that you can use one as a bridge to take the load off the router.

Any suggestions to diagnosing or solving this problem would be massively appreciated. Thanks in advance!

 

[bill001g]

From what I can tell those disk things are simple AP. Your traffic from the directly connected PC will never go out to the remote AP.

Although it is unlikely you could have a IP conflict with another device in the house. If you ping the router IP you should get loss if the problem was inside your house. Since you say you can access the hub when it is broken it almost has to be a ISP issue.

These are hard for the ISP to see sometimes. It will always be fine unless you happen to get a call to the ISP in the 5 minutes it happens to be broken. Does no good to really test it when it is functional. You would think they would see a message in their log.

What might help to convince them is to first run a tracert to 8.8.8.8. This will likely show nothing of interest. What you are after is to get the IP of the ISP first router. It should be the IP in hop 2 for most people. You now want to open a could CMD windows and let constant ping run to the router ip (hop 1) and the ISP first router.
You can then show them that there is no problems inside your house so the pc and router are ok but you see issues with the connection going from your house to the first ISP router. There is a tiny chance this is cabling inside your house between the dmark and the router so you want to check that. Make sure nothing is loose and
disconnect any unused phone wires. You could also run a new cable across the floor and connect directly to the jack in the dmark where the phone wire come into your house.

These issue tend to be some wiring issue outside your house. Phone wires have many splices between your house and phone office and it takes only 1 bad one to cause lots of issues.

 

[AlastairCarter123]

From what I can tell those disk things are simple AP. Your traffic from the directly connected PC will never go out to the remote AP.

Although it is unlikely you could have a IP conflict with another device in the house. If you ping the router IP you should get loss if the problem was inside your house. Since you say you can access the hub when it is broken it almost has to be a ISP issue.

These are hard for the ISP to see sometimes. It will always be fine unless you happen to get a call to the ISP in the 5 minutes it happens to be broken. Does no good to really test it when it is functional. You would think they would see a message in their log.

What might help to convince them is to first run a tracert to 8.8.8.8. This will likely show nothing of interest. What you are after is to get the IP of the ISP first router. It should be the IP in hop 2 for most people. You now want to open a could CMD windows and let constant ping run to the router ip (hop 1) and the ISP first router.
You can then show them that there is no problems inside your house so the pc and router are ok but you see issues with the connection going from your house to the first ISP router. There is a tiny chance this is cabling inside your house between the dmark and the router so you want to check that. Make sure nothing is loose and
disconnect any unused phone wires. You could also run a new cable across the floor and connect directly to the jack in the dmark where the phone wire come into your house.

These issue tend to be some wiring issue outside your house. Phone wires have many splices between your house and phone office and it takes only 1 bad one to cause lots of issues.

Thanks very much for all this, has massively helped in narrowing things down. Really appreciate it.

Just had an outage. Ran the 8.8.8.8 tracert and it didn't make the first hop (time out). I checked my lines between router and PC with an ethernet tester to see if it was a temporary disruption on the line - nothing.

From what I'm guessing in this case it's an IP issue. I've checked the DCHP assigned IPs and there doesn't seem to be any conflict on my side. I've manually set the IP addressing for my device on both router and PC to see if that makes any difference along. I've also changed my duplex settings from auto to 100M full (we only get 60 down here) from a solved issue I saw, similar to mine, on another thread.

Are there any other factors that I should be taking into account? I did wonder if malware could be to blame for it so I soft reset my PC a week or so ago along with RKill scripts etc but other than that I'm not too sure what I could be doing wrong. I also wondered if it was a hardware issue on PC side (motherboard), but if it were that I'm not sure I would even be identifying my router.

 

[bill001g]

In some ways it is better that it is a failing on the first hop it means everything is in your control and you do not have the ISP involved.

Manually assigning IP solves many DHCP issues but you must do it carefully to avoid any future duplication. The DHCP function on some routers is stupid and will give out the same IP you are using. You want to be sure the IP you assign manually are not in the range used by DHCP on the router.
Higher numbers say above .200 tend to be safer because even a stupid dhcp server starts at the bottom.

I would try a IPCONFIG /all command when it fails and see if you are getting a disconnected state which is most times a bad ethernet cable. You should not have to set the speed it actually works best in auto mode. In one of the status screens it will show the speed it negotiated id it is running 100mbps it also indicates a bad cable.

Duplicate IP etc is tricky to find sometimes. The ARP -a command will help. This will show you the mac address being used by the different IP. If you see the mac address change, especially if the mac of the router/gateway changes that indicates a big issue.

 

[AlastairCarter123]

In some ways it is better that it is a failing on the first hop it means everything is in your control and you do not have the ISP involved.

Manually assigning IP solves many DHCP issues but you must do it carefully to avoid any future duplication. The DHCP function on some routers is stupid and will give out the same IP you are using. You want to be sure the IP you assign manually are not in the range used by DHCP on the router.
Higher numbers say above .200 tend to be safer because even a stupid dhcp server starts at the bottom.

I would try a IPCONFIG /all command when it fails and see if you are getting a disconnected state which is most times a bad ethernet cable. You should not have to set the speed it actually works best in auto mode. In one of the status screens it will show the speed it negotiated id it is running 100mbps it also indicates a bad cable.

Duplicate IP etc is tricky to find sometimes. The ARP -a command will help. This will show you the mac address being used by the different IP. If you see the mac address change, especially if the mac of the router/gateway changes that indicates a big issue.

An IPCONFIG /all returns okay. But taking a look at the assigned IPs on my router looks like the range was pretty clogged up at the higher end so wondered if there could be a conflict there.

Double checked on the DCHP address range and surprsingly the ISP router has it set to 64-253 by default (my IP from before was at the higher end of that). I've changed it to a static below the default range but still in the range of the hub (assuming I'm okay to set it down to 1 if I wanted to). Still experiencing outages though.

Could you elaborate more on the ARP command? I've got about 15 dynamic addresses and the static ones I'm assuming are the broadcast IPs from my hub.

Would it be worth me adding a static ARP entry associated with my adapter mac address? Or is that the same as a static IP address? Also would it be worth me disabling the IPv6 protocol?

Thanks again for the insight on all of this, learned far more than I bargained for in the past day.

EDIT - just took a look at the sticky threads here. I've got a few old ISP routers lying about, would cascading my routers to have my PC on one exclusive subnet through a slave router be a fix?

 

[bill001g]

If you have 63-253 for dhcp then you want to use the low addresses for your statics. In general it doesn't matter a lot in a home environment. The router would start at 63 and go up. If you have 100s of devices maybe it would get near the top of the range.

On your machine your mac will always be associated with the IP. It doesn't do much to make a static ARP. It would be more if some device tried to steal the router IP. In that case you could use a static ARP for the router IP. If some other device is using your PC IP then you would need a static in the router which almost no router
can do.

I generally always disable IPv6 support. It has very little benefit and causes strange issues at times. I doubt it is your problem. When you actually key in 8.8.8.8 on the command it will force it to use IPv4. There is likely a IPv6 IP you could use to force IPv6 tracert.