Kwakadilly
Occasional Visitor
I have an Asus RT-AC86U now running Merlin 384.18 (this was also happening on the latest Asus firmware) and I am having a problem where applications that use VOIP will lose connection for 1 second and then reconnect. It happens frequently enough that it is a problem. Applications such as Discord, Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, etc seem to be the problem. It predominately occurs on my personal PC and my work PC, but from time to time also happens on my wifes PC (though it is far and few between).
To give a bit of background, a couple of months ago I had my ISP (it's TDS, a cable connection) come out to my house because we were having some very bad packet loss and a very slow connection. There was in fact several issues, mainly that there was an unneeded coax splitter outside from another provider causing all sorts of problems. The tech took care of that and also swapped our modem out for a new one so we could upgrade to the new 1 gig service over the phone if we wanted. He fixed our issue and everything was running smoothly, expect now we have this VOIP issue.
I bought new ethernet cables for the entire house, I tried different versions of the Asus firmware, I did factory resets, I tried everything I could think of to remedy the problem and nothing worked. I did some tests on DSLReports and we had poor quality, so I called the ISP who sent somebody out to work on the issue. This tech insisted that my 100mbps connection was not enough bandwidth to support all of my devices and I needed to upgrade. I challenged him on that because we had not added any new devices and things ran fine before, but he stated the old modem we had would slow down devices so that you don't lose connection if you're using too much bandwidth. The devices I have are 1 FireTv, 2 720p Roku TV's, 1 720p Roku device, 3 tablets, 2 cell phones, 2 Blink cameras, 1 Amazon Echo, and 3 wired desktop PC's. I wasn't really satisfied with his dismissive "this is a waste of my time" attitude, but I had been meaning to upgrade anyway so I figured why not give it a shot. I upgraded to 300mbps, and that seems to have fixed the DSLReports quality issue, however we have a lot of bufferbloat and the VOIP drops are still happening.
So I went to work on the bufferbloat thinking maybe that was causing this. I installed Merlin on my router, I'm using FreshJR scripts and Adaptive QOS limiting my bandwidth of 85% of my network speed, fq_codel, 18 set for packet overhead (DOCSIS preset). This seems to have solved the bufferbloat for downloads, now we have a bit of bufferbloat for uploads which I will need to work at, but more importantly we still have the VOIP drops. I figured 300mbps was enough, but perhaps I do need even more bandwidth. I have watched bandwidth monitor, traffic analyzer, router CPU, and RAM usage when these drops occur and there is nothing that seems unusual, in fact I don't beleve I am really using that much of my bandwidth to begin with. I could be wrong though, I'm still learning a lot about networking right now. The reason I suspect we are not maxing out our badnwidth is because as I watch the live traffic, or even look at 24 hours of use, we use very little compared to when I run a speedtest, DSLreports etc, which easily triples our use for the duration of the test. I could be wrong though.
Anybody have any other suggestions as far as what I can try to do on my end or is this an ISP issue I need to call them for again? Appreciate the help!
To give a bit of background, a couple of months ago I had my ISP (it's TDS, a cable connection) come out to my house because we were having some very bad packet loss and a very slow connection. There was in fact several issues, mainly that there was an unneeded coax splitter outside from another provider causing all sorts of problems. The tech took care of that and also swapped our modem out for a new one so we could upgrade to the new 1 gig service over the phone if we wanted. He fixed our issue and everything was running smoothly, expect now we have this VOIP issue.
I bought new ethernet cables for the entire house, I tried different versions of the Asus firmware, I did factory resets, I tried everything I could think of to remedy the problem and nothing worked. I did some tests on DSLReports and we had poor quality, so I called the ISP who sent somebody out to work on the issue. This tech insisted that my 100mbps connection was not enough bandwidth to support all of my devices and I needed to upgrade. I challenged him on that because we had not added any new devices and things ran fine before, but he stated the old modem we had would slow down devices so that you don't lose connection if you're using too much bandwidth. The devices I have are 1 FireTv, 2 720p Roku TV's, 1 720p Roku device, 3 tablets, 2 cell phones, 2 Blink cameras, 1 Amazon Echo, and 3 wired desktop PC's. I wasn't really satisfied with his dismissive "this is a waste of my time" attitude, but I had been meaning to upgrade anyway so I figured why not give it a shot. I upgraded to 300mbps, and that seems to have fixed the DSLReports quality issue, however we have a lot of bufferbloat and the VOIP drops are still happening.
So I went to work on the bufferbloat thinking maybe that was causing this. I installed Merlin on my router, I'm using FreshJR scripts and Adaptive QOS limiting my bandwidth of 85% of my network speed, fq_codel, 18 set for packet overhead (DOCSIS preset). This seems to have solved the bufferbloat for downloads, now we have a bit of bufferbloat for uploads which I will need to work at, but more importantly we still have the VOIP drops. I figured 300mbps was enough, but perhaps I do need even more bandwidth. I have watched bandwidth monitor, traffic analyzer, router CPU, and RAM usage when these drops occur and there is nothing that seems unusual, in fact I don't beleve I am really using that much of my bandwidth to begin with. I could be wrong though, I'm still learning a lot about networking right now. The reason I suspect we are not maxing out our badnwidth is because as I watch the live traffic, or even look at 24 hours of use, we use very little compared to when I run a speedtest, DSLreports etc, which easily triples our use for the duration of the test. I could be wrong though.
Anybody have any other suggestions as far as what I can try to do on my end or is this an ISP issue I need to call them for again? Appreciate the help!