What speed is your connection and what are you streaming (resolution, quality etc)?

In reply to a post by smouty:

What speed is your connection and what are you streaming (resolution, quality etc)?

Speed test when all is well shows 18Mbps, we just have a bog standard basic connection. Streaming is usually just basic 720p but were not constantly streaming.

The problem is random/intermittent throughout the day/evening. Roughly 80% of the time it's fine, but 20% of the time there is no internet at all. Some days are much better than others, some much worse. When it goes bad the wireless connection is always good but no internet. If I manage to run a speed test during a bad time I get about 0.5Mbps.

2 laptops here, both Macbook pro's. 1 is old - 2012, other is a bit newer - 2015. Have checked network activity monitor on both & nothing is running that shouldn’t be as far as I’m aware.
Worth mentioning that sometimes the problem does seem to be worse on the older mac. ie sometimes it has no internet but the other is ok. Not always the case though.

Internet was always fine here before we moved provider over to nowTV/sky. As soon as we moved the problems started, nothing else changed apart from provider & new router.

I spoke to nowTV who said they checked the connection & everything looks fine so they cant do anything to help.

Thanks for all the help here so far

Edited by mckenzie126 (Mon 03-Jul-23 11:59:12)

18 mbit is easily used or is it actual 18Mb/s?
Are you Macs using iCloud at all and backing up/syncing all your photos etc in the background?
They will use whatever is available bandwidth wise..

It would be worth seeing if one Mac could be connected with an Ethernet cable to emliminate Wi-Fi as an issue.
ISP provided routers are generally rubbish.

Edited by smouty (Mon 03-Jul-23 13:44:31)

1. Run the laptops via a cabled/wired Ethernet connection back to the router. Switch off WiFI completely and retest/monitor over a decent period of time.

2. Should your still experience the dropouts, then it’s the actual line and/or router. If not then likely it’s a WiFi issue (which could still be the router).

Edited by Pheasant (Mon 03-Jul-23 15:41:30)

It's megabits. No none of them are syncing to icloud.

Yes will try the older laptop with an ethernet cable, the newer one doesn't have an ethernet port.

This week has been really bad, there is a lot of red on the graph, even at night when laptops are off
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...

If I find that the ethernet connected laptop is still bad is there any advice anywhere on how to deal with the provider ? It seems all they do is carry out a line check & if all looks ok then that is the end of conversation.

If the line check their end looks ok does this 100% mean there is nothing they can do ?

It's all quite a coincidence that this started happening as soon as we moved over to them.

Thanks & apologies that this thread is going on so long !

In reply to a post by mckenzie126:

This week has been really bad, there is a lot of red on the graph, even at night when laptops are off
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...

If I find that the ethernet connected laptop is still bad is there any advice anywhere on how to deal with the provider ? It seems all they do is carry out a line check & if all looks ok then that is the end of conversation.
If the line check their end looks ok does this 100% mean there is nothing they can do ?
It's all quite a coincidence that this started happening as soon as we moved over to them.

the red shows paxcket loss.. when it reaches the bottom it means you have 100% loss, i.e. no connectivity.. this is really indicative of a problem rather than using the broadband a lot.. yellow spiking can be from use.. red would have to be very extreme, when we're talking the scale you see - a little bit of red can be a small problem like router bug or something.. a lot of red which comes and gows without a pattern suggests something going on on the network.

Your provider may try to fob you off but I don't think this is normal if the BQM graph matches your experience with other sites .. never rely on just one bit (e.g. BQM) to show a problem.. this is very useful lto illustrate the problem in a way you can share though.

The only thing I'd suggest you check is - can you get your IPv4 address (thinkbroadband.com/ip) and set up a BQM to that - see if the pattern matches. I don't know if NowTV have CGNAT which would stop this from working but it would be good to verify if the issue is IPv6 only or affecting everything. You had one set up in May as "NowTV Broadband 5" on your account with IPv4.. then it wen to v6.

The other thing you could try is disabling IPv6 on the router and see if you have the same problems on your system.

IPv6 isn't the cause but its routing is different from IPv4 so one problem may not appear on the other side.

One final thing - it appears you had a resync of some kind at 02:00 exactly .. your minimum latency doubled from 10ms to 20ms or so.. at the same time there was heavy packet loss.. this indicates to me the router did something at that time..

I just checked your IPv6 address from another system to rule out the BQM tools:

299 packets transmitted, 299 received, 0% packet loss, time 59825ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 18.103/20.745/137.896/10.090 ms

This shows no loss (red) but it shows the yellow spike (137ms)..


seb