Intermittent connection drops

[#1]

I've been having intermittent disconnections on my fibre internet for the past couple of months or so. When I first noticed it I was getting lots of drops and then clear internet for hours and then lots of drops again but after a few days of that it all seemed to clear up to manageable levels.

There have still been connection drops since but not as bad as that so I've kinda put up with it. I've been having difficulty troubleshooting the issue due to the router I use (a ZyXel NBG4604) not having any access to line stats of any kind, not even ppp uptime. I have a dynamic IP but with plusnet that doesn't mean much as you often keep the same IP through a disconnection so I can't even use the IP address as a way to check if the modem has lost synch or not. I ran a continuous ping to the router and that doesn't drop so my internal connection to the router isn't the issue I don't think.

I've just had at a bunch of disconnections within an hour (I've been connected to IRC so I've seen drops there on both networks I'm connected to) and I decided to try some more troubleshooting on the line and get to the bottom of this. I started going through the fault check wizard and realised before I continue it'd be helpful to know if plusnet is seeing the disconnections or not so I was hoping someone could help out with that as well as giving me an idea of what steps I could try to troubleshoot the issue more as there is lots of conflicting information in the guides due to differing products and hardware.

The hardware in use is the ZyXel NBG4604 mentioned earlier connected via an ethernet cable to the openreach modem which is connected to a double master socket via an rj11 cable,

Cheers

Joe

[#2]

We aren't seeing that many disconnects from here

Do you connect over a wired or wireless connection?

[#3]

I have been having similar intermittent drops, usually for about 30 - 60 seconds each but sometimes for longer.  They can occur every hour or two, sometimes more frequently - up to about 6 episodes per hour.

It is extremely frustrating but I just don't know what else to try.

Any ideas?

[#4]

Wired connection. I;ve run pings to the router during one of the times when the connection was dropping a lot a couple of months ago and that stayed fine. Because I can't see any line stats or logs in my router I honestly didnt know how bad the disconnections have been as I could only really track it while on IRC and I started making the post during the half hour or so in the graph where you see a bunch of disconnections and I was worried it was going to get as bad as it was a couple of months ago.

As you can see from the graph it's not constant which is why it's been infuriating as it gets bad enough for me to want to track down whats going on then when I do it all clears up again. Last month it was seemingly almost daily but it'd just DC once and then be fine for the rest of the day. Since then it's been mostly fine until today and it has cleared up again after that mad half hour.

I could try changing out the ethernet cable connecting the router to the modem but I don't have an rj11 cable spare to change that out. I can't really connect to the test socket as we use a double faceplate not a microfilter and I don't know where those would be if we ever had any as it's been 4 years since we got this installed.

 Edit: I've just checked some IRC logs and notice some drops that aren't showing on your graph, including one at about 16:20 this afternoon, so I think there are a mixture of issues. There are occasional line drops, including the multiple drops earlier today, but I think the issue with the more regular problems must be either my connection to the router or the router itself. I'll have to see if I can find the original router we got and try that out.

[#5]

Hi, I've just been running diagnostics against your line and we're not seeing anything obvious. Can you try following the checks here next please? - https://goo.gl/tu2WWu

[#6]

I've just ran through most of those checks. I'll have to do the cable checking tomorrow as there are now people using the internet here and as it's currently stable I don't want to interupt by checking cable connections.

The voice line is fine, we've had no issues on that at all.

The cabling I'll have to fully check tomorrow. I'm not sure if we have spares of some cables to test for actual cabling issues. I'll see what we have spare when I test the cable connections tomorrow.

The modem is plugged in to the master socket. We only have the one socket so there's no extension wiring that could be causing the issue. I would have to try to find a microfilter to try the test socket as we have a double socket so can't just plug everything into the test socket with the faceplate removed if that's something you need me to test. Of course if the frequent disconnections are internal then the cable to the modem wouldn't be the issue.

I've just set up a ping monitor from my computer to the router and a thinkbroadband monitor to test the connection from externally so I can hopefully narrow down where the issue is. I'm also going to keep my IRC client open so I can reference different logs to see if that helps narrow things down.

The fact  that the graph doesn't show all the disconnections I've been seeing on IRC means the issue is probably on the old router I use. I'll give these monitors a couple of days so I have some more info to go on now that I know it's probably not an external issue.

I really appreciate all your help with this.

[#7]

Let us know how your testing goes.

[#8]

I've checked all the cabling and all cables are seated fully. I've not had time to see what spare, if any, we have to be able to switch out cables but I've looked through the various logs. IRC dropped 4 times this morning, the first at 09:29 and then three more times at 10:14, 10:28 and 10:34. Ping monitor shows no drops between my computer and the router with an average ping time of less than 1ms during those times. The thinkbroadband monitor shows high spikes of packet loss that correspond to those times as seen in this image.

I don't know if the radius logs show disconnections during those times or not and as stated before the logs from my router are less than useless.

[#9]

No disconnections today.

[#10]

this looks/sounds very similar to my issue... 

https://community.plus.net/t5/Fibre-Broadband/Intermittent-Regular-Fault-amp-Loss-of-service/td-p/14...

will be interested in any insights on this thread

[#11]

Has anyone ever got this fixed? the disconnects are entirely random and it's always the hub that drops the connection then re-establishes it 30 seconds later. This has been happening since i joined plusnet in 2014.

Here are several lines from the event log which appear to begin the connection drop/restart:

(4402866.550000) PPP LCP Send Termination Request [User request]

(4521931.620000) PPP LCP Send Termination Request [User request]

(559966.130000) PPP LCP Send Termination Request [User request]

[#12]

@KS25, your connection seems fairly stable other than a couple of drops just yesterday:

When are the small section of router logs you've posted actually from?

[#13]

Those were just the lines from when these drops are happening, we have a different definition of "stable" i think, when playing games there are random lag spikes, disconnects are entirely random, can be dc free for more than a week then have a few of them in a day...

I'd love to know why the lag and disconnects happen, a vague test to show when the line is up and down doesn't really explain anything.

Is there anything happening on the plusnet network at the time of these drops that might explain what appear to be random issues? I think this is the only way to get to the bottom of it, it can't be the hubone because it happened when i was still using the technicolor router and modem before this, the phoneline tests come back ok too, so it must be something on the network itself.

[#14]

Things happening on our network wouldn't directly affecting sync or connectivity local to you, these are between the router and cabinet/exchange.

Ping spikes can happen for a huge variety of reasons, changes in local conditions, usage on the line, exchange issues, exchange capacity, router problems etc

Can you keep a record of when you're seeing the issues and try to capture a traceroute to bbc.co.uk or similar when this happens so we can see the increase in ping times.

[#15]

Traced my problem to TP Link connection. Now solved.

Thanks, guys.