Been having some glitchiness with my Internet connection lately. Not speed – I’m getting 230 Mbps or so on my most distant computer with my 802.11ac Orbi setup.
The issue has been stability. Sometimes when I’d hit a website, the browser would tell me it couldn’t find the IP address of the website. And during a Zoom rehearsal yesterday, I was getting periodic freezing of the connection that others weren’t experiencing. I wasn’t losing Wi-Fi connections, just the Internet wasn’t Internetting.
I think I may have fixed things through a combination of resetting the cable modem and the Orbi, swapping the placements of my full-on Orbi satellite and my weirdo Orbi Voice, and setting the Orbi to use Google DNS.
But I want to check and see if I’m still getting periodic loss of Internet connectivity before my next rehearsal. Are there consumer-simple tools that I can use to monitor my Internet connection stability, to make sure I’m not losing connectity between my network and the Internet?
After a few years of the Orbi setup being rock-solid, my troubleshooting skills have atrophied. :) Any tips on tools I can use to see if I might be having failures, and if so, if they’re on the router end or the cable modem end, would be greatly appreciated.
How simple? Do you want to run something 24/7 to monitor and log your connection, or just do some tests on-request? On a dedicated box, or on a shared Windows desktop or?
Simple, Windows, but limited runtime if free:
RaspberryPi 4 running Pi-Hole, Premethius and Grafana is pretty good for these details:
Tons of variables that could cause that, not to mention one of them is still the enormous work from home traffic all ISPs are facing, still.
Pingplotter used to have a free version you could use for latency/reachability monitoring. You really need to catch things like this when they go on though.
Let me go on record though and tell you, no matter how robust you think your wireless is, plug in and see if there is any issue ever when on a wired connection. There are x number of issues you can have on a wired connection to the internet. There are x times a large factor of issues you can run into on wireless. Just for troubleshooting purposes, plug in for a few days.
To get most of the way to what net uptime monitor does without spending any money you can run three instances of gping pointing at three different IPs.
I’m just wanting to see if my connection is dropping anymore. It looks like the work I did solidified it, but I’m going to run Graphical Ping to a few websites for a while just to see how things look (since that’s a super-easy to set up test).
I left a command line ping running while I was out for about four hours tonight and it only lost 3 packets in that time, and I haven’t seen more weirdness in browsing, so hopefully I’ve remedied the issue.
I have extensive monitoring on my LAN using a program named monit, several dozen checks, and also monitor Qt3 and a couple other sites to check internet connectivity. That seems a bit excessive for you though, and if you hadn’t already verified no problem I would have recommended pingplotter too.
Network seemed rock-solid. Then did a test Zoom with my girlfriend and at the end of a 30-minute call it started hitching and freezing. Guessing I’ll have to just set up a greenscreen background and run a wired connection when I’m doing the show online – I can’t afford to have it hitch during the show.
Really frustrating. Desktop PC has been rock-solid, laptop was great for everything else I did and then had the Zoom issues and also failed during a big download from GoG. Wondering if I should try swapping in my spare Intel AX200 card into the laptop.
Sounds annoying. Maybe the best you can do is try and verify if the problem are in the Orbi or on your side, or between the cable modem and the provider network.
We have been tracking regularly what I am calling micro-outages in our business Spectrum service. The connection never drops, but for 30 sec to 3 mins or so there is no packet traffic in or out, and then things just recover start working again. This is bad, as you can imagine, when it happens during a livestream. Spectrum doesn’t consider it an outage since the connection never goes down. Maybe we will have Google fiber here as an option soon…
