1 second disconnect every night after 11pm?

[#1]

Hi all,

Long-term user of Plusnet due to the reliability of their connection. I game each night, always online, so a resilient network is critical to me, however over the past few weeks, very late into the night, my connection will drop for a second or so, enough to kick me from whatever game I may be in, so it's starting to grate on me somewhat. Tonight it was 11:25pm, kicked from an online fps game i was in, also the PSN party, this also happened to another console in the house.

Has anyone else experienced this? I know it's the internet as I have my PC open simultaneously, and the ability to access websites isn't possible. I do nothing to restore the connection; it's so quick I would only notice if I were in an online game.

I wanted to report it to Plusnet. Can you not send web notes anymore? Only calling was the option when going to contact us.

Thanks

[#2]

A 1 second break is not a disconnection.

Disconnections - the loss of sync - take at least 30 seconds to reestablish the connection. You will see the router lights flash through their different colours. Do you see that?

I would suspect that this is spike noise on the line from an electrical switching spike such as the central heating turning off. Which router are you using?

[#3]

Is this device WiFI connected?

There is another possibility which might give rise to a very short break - a WiFi connection flip. Either between 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands or the router switching channels to “optimise” the WiFi spectrum.

That said such breaks will be longer than one second.

[#4]

Hi,

My devices are connected physically, consoles and PC.

Router is a netgear xr1000, unfortunately, that is downstairs, so I cannot see what the lights are showing when it happens. Is there something I could ping or something else later in the night that could help narrow down the issue? It's not the same time but usually, after the 11pm mark, I can't think of anything in the house on a time schedule that would be causing an issue.

[#5]

Another possible cause of a short blip is the device's DHCP lease expiring and being renewed. That can affect wired and wireless devices. Each device will have its own lease, but if the devices were all connected at about the same time (e.g. a router reboot) then they will expire at about the same time.

Of course, the router logs will probably explain the blips if you are able to access them (I don't use Plusnet routers - others may be able to tell you how to access the logs).

[#6]

Thanks, I have reserved IP's for all my devices, so the lease shouldn't happen. 

I will check the logs when I'm home and post here if they still exist for last night. Will keep an eye on them when it happens next.

[#7]

Reserved or static?

Reserved IPs are still allocated by the DHCP server with a lease - the point being that they always get the same IP address.  I Believe that is also the case for the external IP address.

It would be worth looking to see if the router will work with router stats - see the link below.

Also inspect the router logs for around the time that the events happen.

Ethernet connected - real end to end ethernet or are powerline adapters involved?

[#8]

Hi, they're reserved rather than static, but happy to change to the latter for testing purposes.

Will keep an eye on the logs tonight should it occur

[#9]

Happened tonight at 10:26pm. Same thing. I'm struggling to know where to look for logs with this router,  it uses a Netduma interface and although there lots of applets, nothing that helps provide any info.

Is it worth just logging with Plusnet to investigate? Will they actually do anything? 

[#10]

A quick Google offers - https://kb.netgear.com/24224/How-do-I-view-the-activity-logs-of-my-Nighthawk-router

An expensive piece of kit … with a lot of grumbles about performance and stability. Check the logs and take it from there. A one second glitch sounds like a router issue. Unless logs show resyncs (which take much longer than a second or two) there is zero point taking this up with an ISP.

[#11]

I will raise on the netduma forum and see what they suggest. I’ve had this router for over a year on the same configuration so odd this would start to happen.

[#12]

---

@andybtsn1 wrote:

Hi,

My devices are connected physically, consoles and PC.

.... Router is a netgear xr1000, unfortunately, that is downstairs,

---

What do you mean by 'physical'? Is there an Ethernet cable installed or are you using Powerline devices? If Powerline have you tried moving your computer or using a long Ethernet cable temporarily to see if it fixes it. Long lengths of made up cat5e cable are not that expensive.

[#13]

Hi, by physical I meant everything is wired via cat 5. No power lines, just the odd switch to connect everything up

[#14]

So it could be a blip on the switch … or a firmware update on the router which has caused this to … just start happening?

Anything to do with the connection (that is something in the ISP’s domain) is going to take more than “just a second” to reconnect.

Personally I’d turn to the game provider … anything which cannot sustain a second or so blip in a comms network is clearly defective. But personally I’d play chess or read a book.