It's just happening at night with no internet connection from my side.
It's just happening at night with no internet connection from my side.
Hey everyone, I'm posting here because my last resort is a problem I've been having for a few months. Every evening, starting around 7pm, I get packet loss anywhere from 3% to 7%. This affects any game i play. I have had two techs come out from my ISP, and they said everything looked good; SNR is great, speeds are good, latency is good, and our node isn't under a huge load. Jitter is also low. I'm not very handy at this sort of thing, but we recently had a family member move in who competes in e-sports tournaments, so i would like to try and fix it. If you need more info, please let me know. I have replaced all the cables to the modem and router, also replaced the ethernet from my desktop. My modem is a motorola mb8600. I bought a new router (currently using an ASUS AC2900) and previously was using a tplink archer ax10. Both routers experienced this same problem. We have 800mb cable internet. The ISP says they dont throttle. There is 1 desktop (wired), 2 phones, 1 macbook, and 1 tv on the device list. I get packet loss even if im just connected directly to the modem. Packet loss seems to go down upon router reboot for a short while. Again, i dont know if any of this is useful, and if not, please let me know what i need to do testwise. Ill happily do them. Thank you!
You need to watch out for those "esport" types. They often blame everything else when they lose, even though their real skill isn't the issue. You should test things a bit more carefully to figure out where the problem lies. If you tested the cable that goes from your house, it's not just like dirt or water getting in some connections. Be sure to run all tests on an ethernet cable; wifi is very sensitive and can mess up your results.
I would start by leaving a constant ping running to 8.8.8.8. If you see no loss here, the problem is probably outside your ISP network. You can continue testing IPs like the game company does, but even if you find something bad, there isn't much you can do about it.
If you see loss going to 8.8.8.8, run tracert 8.8.8.8. This won't likely show anything useful right away; the goal is to get the IP addresses of the routers along the path. What you want to do now is start pinging various hops in that trace and find the first hop that acts up. This can be tricky because some routers are set to limit responses so they stop ping requests from hitting them (to avoid attacks).
If you see loss at hop 2, that often means the connection between your house and the ISP. But maybe the issue is if the ISP comes out during the day but the problem only happens at night; they might not catch it then. You share the connection between your house and the first ISP node with all your neighbors. If a neighbor gets home from work and starts doing something, their equipment wouldn't show up when the ISP was testing because theirs would be off. A neighbor could have a faulty modem or maybe they have other stuff hooked to the cable like moca adapters without a filter. It could also be that a bunch of neighbors are using too much bandwidth at once, which exceeds the total shared bandwidth of the network segment. Normally you see big spikes in latency (delay) instead of packet loss in that case.
Still, you need to test first to find where the problem is. It might go farther into the network and even be the ISP if they aren't perfect; maybe they could check some routers that have a defective interface or something, but you would have to give them a clue about which router it is. Having the router in another ISP network won't help.
Unless you use fiber, radio waves from your running radio will bounce off metal like copper unless you paid a lot for silver wires, which actually don't do much anyway. When the sun gets hot and black wires get warm or cool, they move or shrink. Old things installed poorly might not connect well when cold. But when it heats up again, they expand and fix the connection roughly enough that everything looks good. Most ISPs keep records of your modem for a week so they can see what happened at night to figure out if the problem is just on your modem, in the neighborhood, or somewhere else bigger. It's not instant though. They need some work and time to find out especially if it happens outside your house.