Router or ISP - Spotty Connectivity and Speed?

[tallen234]

Hi All,

I've been having some significant connectivity problems over the past few days. I've been losing internet connection intermittently, sometimes 1-2 times over a couple of hours and other times it will be rock solid for many hours. My wife does occasional live webinars, so I need to get this solved quickly.

I have a Netgear R6900 and have Cox Gigablast. I have the I have performed a reset of the modem and the router. One weird thing I noticed in checking speed, is that I seem to get much better performance using the wireless network than with the ethernet connection. However, with the ethernet connections, I get variable results depending on what speed tests I use. For example, when I use the Cox speed test I get 27.7/0.1 internet speed, when I use the speedtest app (ookula) for Windows 10, I get 59.28/.35. When I try SpeedofMe through my browser I get 680.37/590.56 and when I try dslreports I get 162/176. When I check wireless speed on my ipad using 5G wireless, I get 479/452.

I just downloaded EMCO to check on the stability of connections. Since I started typing this, I've had no connectivity problems.

Any further ideas to trouble shoot would be greatly appreciated.

 

[degrub]

what bandwidth up/down are you paying for ?

other than the ipad, were all of the other speed tests done over cabled ethernet using the same ethernet port on the device ?
or were they different devices and possibly over wireless ?

 

[degrub]

have you looked at the modem logs to see if there are connection issues between the modem and the ISP ?
Also, check your router logs.

 

[tallen234]

what bandwidth up/down are you paying for ?

other than the ipad, were all of the other speed tests done over cabled ethernet using the same ethernet port on the device ?
or were they different devices and possibly over wireless ?

Thank you for the response. Other than the iPad, all of the other speed tests were done over cabled ethernet using the same port on the device. In fact they were done one right after another this morning. I've never tried to look at the modem logs. I'll take a deep dive to see how to do that. Cox Gigablast (according to their website, it claims 940 Mbps download/35 Mbps upload), uses a Alcatel-Lucent modem.

 

[degrub]

Might be the cable or the router/device port causing issues. Look at the link rate (100mbit, 1000mbit) reported by windows or osx.
make sure of the same for the router uplink to the modem. on both you can tell by looking at the link rate led on the port. color may be device specific, but mine are green=1000mbit, yellow=100mbit. usually the left hand light when you are looking at the port.
to rule out the router, connect using a known good ethernet cable (maybe a new one ?) directly into the modem lan port. Don't use your current one if that one has been used for the hardwired tests. You can use it, but if it is having issues, you likely will see the same results. Run your speed tests from there.
If that looks ok consistently, take the same cable and plug into each of the router ports and run the tests. If you have something like QOS or deep packet inspection or any other "extras" running in the router, disable them temporarily and see what the tests are giving.