Issues with my wireless internet

[Beefcrinkle]

Well I am at a loss of what my issue can be so i come to the forums for help. My wireless internet slows to a crawl or drops the internet when 3 or more computers or laptops are hooked up. When internet drops the wifi signal will remain strong but show as limited/ no internet. I have tried a cheap rosewill router as well as a belkin N450. I have Comcast internet with the SMC router for business class internet, Witch is the hooked into my wireless router. If you have any other questions I will try my best at answering them.

 

[stevech]

hook up one PC at a time; perhaps one of them has a configuration error or malware. You can also watch the activity lights on the router or PC and see if one seems to be berzerk with high traffic.
Might be some sort of ARP or layer 2 issue that floods too many packets/sec.

 

[Beefcrinkle]

We turn them on 1 by one and it seems to have no sort of order. it just seems to happen when the 3rd pc is turned on.

 

[Beefcrinkle]

hear is my trace route imgur link http://imgur.com/guIBi

 

[stevech]

tracert looks OK at 20mSec. Unusual that all those routers in the path don't respond to pings, but that could be the way your ISP arranges things.

Run ping -t to the router's gateway address such as 192.168.1.1 from the wifi device(s). Run it for a long time and look at the ping failure rate and the number of long (> 5mSec) ping responses. This is summary test of your wifi, irrespective of the ISP. The ping times will be longer in the evening busy hour if you are having a lot of competition for air time due to heavy-use neighbors near the same channel you're on.

 

[Beefcrinkle]

Thanks for the fast reply. Since I have the SMC router it has a built in ping/tracert function. If i trace route from within the SMC modem it just gives the stars. For some reason my modem is blocking the tracert. I am not home as of now but i will run the trace tonight. I look forward to your reply

If i do a trace route in a similar setup just larger internal network connected to the SMC modem I can trace route the entire way to google.com

 

[stevech]

the "*" in the trace rt are probably just routers in the path that are policy-based/configured to not respond to ping/ICMP.
The round trip to the final host had a 20mSec number and that seemed reasonable.
ping 4.2.2.2 or 8.8.8.8 should give consistent results most of the time.

your topic here was problems with the WiFi.
Tracert from the router out towards the internet isn't relevant to WiFi.
please re-read prior post for suggestion on WiFi fault isolation.

 

[Beefcrinkle]

ping my router the highest the ping went was 16ms this is at peak times

 

[stevech]

what was the approximate average?
16mSec occurring rarely is OK.

 

[Beefcrinkle]

let it run for about an hour 10-20% was above 10 and the rest was below. I was in VOIP call during part of it.

 

[stevech]

OK if that hour was in the evening busy hours - like 6-11PM local.

 

[Beefcrinkle]

During my trouble shooting I had comcast come out and check the cable. They had to reset my router 6 times to get it to communicate properly to the line. So my internet issues may not of been the router. I do appreciate all the help and If i have any more issues I will post in this thread.

 

[Beefcrinkle]

Well I lied. We turned on a 4th pc today and then every thing started to lag really bad, The internet did not crash but it was lagging. Upon pining the router with the command in the earlier post, I just kept getting timed out. I am not sure what the deal is. we have scanned computers and nothing seems to rear its head. I am now checking settings making sure they all look correct. here is a pastebin of the logfile from the router http://pastebin.com/TxFg9qKB