Internet essentially unusable

[JoeDanish]

I have trawled the web high and low for a solution to my problem, but cannot find any.

In my house we have three laptops, one Mac desktop and three xboxs. We live in London and have a good broadband connection with 02. We experienced no problems for the first month but suddenly everything has gone wrong. My laptop and xbox are both brand new, and the only 'old' piece of equipment is the Mac. The internet will work for five minutes, and then drop out, then come back in five minutes. This problem has been experienced since the start of this week. Some days it will be fine, other days it will barely work at all.

All Xbox, when they do connect, work on an open NAT type.

The connection often drops even though it says on the laptop that it is still connected, I will just recieve a 'warning' symbol across the bars symbolising that it isnt working, although still registers its connected. Other times it will completley disconnect from the network.

when I 'diagnose' Windows suggests its a problem with an 'access point', but in my experience the windows diagnosis tool is worth nothing.

Problem:

Internet will connect and disconnect both on Xbox Live and on the laptops, both with wirless and with ethernet connections every five minutes. Even posting this is a struggle. We are all operating on windows 7 apart from the Mac.
Unplugging the router solves nothing and all virus scans are clear. Does anyone have any suggestions to solve our problem?

[rch1231]

Hello,

A couple of things to try.

Double check the cabling from where the internet connects to the house all of the way to the router making sure that all of the connections are tight and solid.

Check the router and modem for heat and see if one of them is very hot which could mean it is failing.

Run a continuous ping and see if the connection is dropping. On a Windows system get to a command prompt and enter:

ping /t 4.2.2.2 
or
ping /t google.com

The slash t will cause it to continue to ping till you do a CTRL C to stop it. Watch the times and see if the suddenly increase. If you can ping continually then your connection is ok you are just getting slowed down somewhere along the way.

Let me know how it goes.

[JoeDanish]

63 packets sent, 63 recieved, 0% loss.

Minimum round trip 27ms, max 55ms, average 30ms.

Is this good?

[rch1231]

That is good depending on what address you pinged. Did you run the ping long enough for the internet to fail or during a period when it did fail so you could see if you are losing connectivity?
When you say the internet drops what exactly do you mean? Can you describe for me what you are experiencing in a little more detail?

[suley04]

Hi,

There used to be a similar problem in my work place, where every so often the internet would "drop" the connection and the computers would be in an offline state for a few minutes at least, until you either reset the router via the web interface or until you physically took the power connection out from the back of the router and re-inserted it. However, I don't think this is exactly the same problem you are having but you could try....

either replacing the Micro Filter/Splitter you have at the phone socket which connects to your wireless router, or if that doesn't work then you probably need to go into the router's web interface and change the time it takes to reset the router (as this could also be what's causing the problem).

Obviously, if that hasn't made any difference then let us know and we will try to investigate further.

[JoeDanish]

That is good depending on what address you pinged. Did you run the ping long enough for the internet to fail or during a period when it did fail so you could see if you are losing connectivity?
When you say the internet drops what exactly do you mean? Can you describe for me what you are experiencing in a little more detail?

The internet didnt drop that day. It will happen every 1-3 days, it will just go through a period of constantly disconnecting everybody, so all streaming stops etc. (including dropping xboxs from game servers)

It's been alright for a couple days, but is doing it again now. Will run the test again.

[JoeDanish]

I wonder if giving static IP addresses could fix the issue? With so many laptops etc maybe theyre all trying to rob eachother?

[rch1231]

It could be something to do with the DHCP IP lease to the computers but hard to tell. The only other thing I can think of is start looking for some sort of activity that is taking place at the same time as the outages. Is someone making a call and you have a DSL line? Is it when one of the X-Box systems is up or if both are? Do you have a cordless telephone (not cellular but a portable phone for your land line and someone is using it?

surley04 made a good point about the DSL splitter/filter. If this is a DSL line you have to have the filters on every phone and on the router and the cables plugged into the correct port in each case. The filters stops static on the phones and stops the phones from interfering with the data stream.

[suley04]

I wonder if giving static IP addresses could fix the issue? With so many laptops etc maybe theyre all trying to rob eachother?

I doubt that a static IP address will fix the issue. It can't possibly be anything to do with devices trying to "rob each other" because you will get something along the lines of a warning/notification telling you that two devices had the same IP address on the network. And, if two IP addresses are the same on the network, then why would the other devices not be able to connect to the internet? - it would only be the devices with matching IP addresses that would be affected...

oh, and filters don't stop "static" on the phones, they stop (filter out) interference between voice data (from your phone), and binary data (from your computer network and connected wireless devices). That is why it is called a filter.

Hope that helps. :)

[caperjack]

i would suspect a bad wireless router

[jingda]

What caperjack said might be close. Some part in the router might be breaking down and you probably need a new one. You can try borrowing a router from someone to test it out whether your router is having problems.