Connectivity Issues

[#1]

Hi, We are having connectivity issues - to be honest I have no idea if we have a router problem or a line problem so I thought I would start here.

Firstly, we have recently had our hub one replaced because the old one would lose connectivity between the wifi and the wired connections - so we are probably more sensitive to issues now than we might have been before we were "thinking" about it.

So problems - we often have 2 of us trying to play computer games (roblocks, world of tanks for example) and there will frequently be a third reading / playing ipad games (like candy crush but not that, no idea what it's called, getting enough grief from the Mrs as it is without rattling that cage) and we often find we get "laggy" response from games which we haven't had before - the router says our broadband connection is kind of as expected. Yes we do have other things running - so we've got the likes of of OneDrive kicking around but stopping that sort of thing seems to make no difference (admittedly when the PCs start all of these services have a flurry of activity and that's fair enough). 

Meanwhile, over on the wifi side I have noticed when working at home that I seem to feel the that network connectivity has the occassional really awful response and my wife has been moaning a lot about "losing connection" on her ipad. Today I got home from work and was met with a tirade of how patchy the connection had been while she was working from home.

I don't honestly know how to diagnose the problem - the network is up but when I look in the event logs on the router I seem to be getting a lot of blocked traffic and connections closed and on hte wifi data a lot of client associated/  disassociated and a selection of "wifi registration failed".

I have been through the "home network" and identified all bar one device and whilst I cannot figure out what it is it wouldn't surprise me to find I have forgotten something and where we live I'm not seeing our neighbours as likely to be abusing our internet but the router seems to give no data about how much traffic each device is using so a bit stumped there.

Ok so I have wittered on for a while but will summarise with I don't know how to proceed with identifying what the problem is so any pointers greatfully received.

Thanks

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Thanks for getting in touch @Balance.

I'm sorry to hear that you've been having issues with your connection.

We've tested your line and we can't see any issues remotely with the line that would cause this.

However based on what you've said it may be worth desyncing the wireless bands to see if the issue is only affecting one band or both.

I've included instructions below on how to do this.

1) In your browser go to 192.168.1.254.
2) Hit Advanced Settings and enter your Hub admin password when prompted (unless you've changed it, you'll find the default password on the settings card)
3) Continue to Advanced Settings.
4) Tap on Wireless.
5) Choose 5GHz tab.
6) Change 'Sync with 2.4Ghz' to No.
7) Change the name of the 'Wireless SSID'
8) Save the changes.

Let us know how you get on

[#3]

That's brilliant thank you, I've had no further complaints about wifi issues.

Internet connection often seems to lag but will review what we've got kicking around the house and start from scratch on that one, thank you for the help

[#4]

Let us know how it goes @Balance

[#5]

Well...two weeks on and I am seeing disconnections quite frequently while on wifi and notable lag when more than 1 person is trying to play world of tanks. However, browsing sites works ok - looking at the logs they are packed full of spoofing blocks so I wonder if there is something hitting us. The router says the connection is ok etc but I wonder if the router itself isnt coping with the amount of activity it is being asked to do?

[#6]

Hi @Balance

It might be worth looking at some further wireless troubleshooting.

I'd recommend looking at changing the wireless channels if you haven't already done so.

It's easy to do, just follow the guide @MatthewWheeler sent above and on each of the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz pages you'll see a drop down box to change the channel. Give it an hour or so between changing the channel and stick with the one you find is best.

There's also further wireless troubleshooting tips in our guide here.

In addition, I thought I should ask, do you only see connection issues when playing specifically on world of tanks?

[#7]

Thanks for that, I had already done that, I don't think the wireless connection is actually dropping, I think it is response that is a problem.

I've been doing some fairly unscientific investigation and watching ping times, comparing bbc.co.uk, google.co.uk, the router's IP address, my Synology NAS' local IP address  and the xbox. Both my Xbox and synology nas respond mostly 1ms or less so I am happy that my home network is working as expected.  I've since attached a laptop on the wired ports to the router and that pings  my PC in < 1ms.

Pinging google and bbc is good, I'd say in the 9 to 15 ms range, but I get periods, sometimes several times a minute where bbc and google respond in 300-700ms, neither are identical but both are as close to the same time as I can test.

I expect the occasional slow response as that is just normal talking to things out there but sometimes those ping times are mirrored in slow ping times to the router as well which has left me wondering about why that would be and whether the routers is the bottleneck or something on the network is hogging the bandwidth but I don't know how to narrow down any further.

[#8]

Thanks for getting back to us @Balance 

Some hops on a traceroute will show high latency or time out which is generally just a red herring as those hops would just be programmed to give priority to internet traffic as opposed to responding back to you. In particular, Google and BBC are known to do this which isn't bad, it's just their servers aren't there for us to ping (needlessly in their eyes).

Could you run a traceroute to pingbox1.thinkbroadband.com instead? That's setup to accept and welcome ping requests.

I'm also seeing your router hasn't dropped connection in 40 days, can you try rebooting your router? 

Finally do you have any connectivity issues on your laptop that's connected directly into the router?