Best way to monitor network through house ?

Current situation....

Am with Sky Fibre Max 'up to 72 Mbps' - typically get around 52 Mbps.

Sky router located in my home office downstairs.
Have homeplugs located in home office, living room, 2 bedrooms upstairs and the garage (for NAS).
Have SkyQ box, with mini box in main bedroom upstairs - both boxes connect to network via home plugs.
Have several Amazon Echos around the house connecting via Wifi.
Son has XboxOne in bedroom (opposite corner to router) - connects by Homeplug (or Wifi).

Problem is that signal keeps dropping. We 'think' it is the broadband into the house.
Son keeps losing his connecting on Xbox - whether he is connected by Homeplug or Wifi.
I listen to the radio on Echo, and periodically it drops off .

If we test the broadband speed, it almost always displays the full 52-ish Mbps speed.
The issue is that it doesn't appear to be 'constant'.

How do I measure it...?

I 'think' I need an app (prefereably on ipad) where I can wander around the house and measure wifi speeds, and perhaps idendify hot/cold spots.
But I also need to leave it on so that I can meausre how 'constant' the connection is.

I'm not sure what else to do. If I contact Sky, they will just say broadband is fine - after all any spot check shows full 52Mbps.

Any suggestions?

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...

Will ping your router and thus show if the broadband line is dropping.

If the broadband does drop out then logging into the web admin interface will show the uptime is low, or still reconnecting, VDSL2 takes around 1 minute to reconnect so you should be able to see this.

On the speed tests https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest records the throughput graphs and while for many the numbers may be good the graphs can give you hints of whether speeds are brilliant or variable.

NOTE: You need to have one device connected directly via Ethernet, since Wi-Fi, Home Plugs all have their own quirks, and another possibility is that the number of devices is breaking the NAT side of the SkyQ, so experimenting with a lot less connected for a few days might help.

Thanks for your comments and advice.

I've set up the Quality Monitor, but now need to study the chart and learn what all the elements mean.
Minimum latency is 10ms, but average latency bumping up to 20 for periods, with many spikes of 60-100ms max latency. I wonder if this is the cause of our sporadic dropouts...?

Anyway, I rang Sky to ask if they could see anything. As expected, they tested the line and said it was shopwing a constant 55 Mbps.

After a chat, I came away with three suggestions from them:

* They don't recommend the use of Homeplugs (the guy suggested that the Sky Q installer should have refused to install with Homeplugs, although I have been using them for many years)
In any case, he suggested that they can interfere with the SQY broadband

* My Sky Q mini Box has been turned off for the past week - seems the extension cable had failed; I re-plugged it into a wall socket and it came on. He suggested that the Xbox was previously connecting to the SKY Q mini box, but when that stopped working it was connecting to the main SkyQ Box downstairs. I DID explain that the Xbox was actually connected to a Homeplug in my next to the Xbox, but he seemed to think the XBox would still be using the SKY Q Mini.....

* He suggested that I had a large number of devices connected to the internet and this might be causing the dropouts.
I don't fully understand this issue about 'number of connected devices' - although your suggestion that a large number might cause an issue with SkyQ.
I'm assuming most households are like me and have a large number of devices connected to the home network, though crucially (I thought) weren't all 'using' the internet at the same time!
I have the Sky Q Box, my main desktop, 5 monile phones, 3 Amazon Echos, couple of ipads, 2 or three laptops, an iKettle and perhaps several other internet-enabled devices. But only the Sky Q, desktop and Xbox one are typically in use simulaneously. And surely a 55Mbps connection sjhould be able to cope witht his. The phones, Echos etc, might be used briefly from time to time, and perhaps might be making brief connections from time to time, but I assumed this wouldmn't impact performance.
The alternative would be to disconnect the mobiles and the Echos etc until needed - surely not practical...

Anyway, I'll see if the SKY Q Mini box being on makes any difference.
And will also check the monito periodically

Installing Acrylic wifi for Windows would let you see all the local access points. No doubt there are other similar Windows applications, and there are also Android apps. Wifi and home plugs are generally less reliable than a wired ethernet connection.

Spikes of yellow should not cause drop outs, since the connection is still working just has a slower response time to requests at that time, and the yellow might actually be down to your own usage.

In short to get a base line for the connection you need to look at the graph at a time when you knowing nothing was doing anything.

If the connection is dropping at you will see top to bottom lines of red.

NOTE: 55 Mbps will be plenty for what you have device wise, but there is something called NAT which maps the one Internet IP address in the Sky Q to the many devices and it may be the table that manages this translation filling up. This will NOT show up in the monitor, so if the monitor is ALL good and you have drop outs then you are looking at something like the Sky Q or other issues. The more devices you have the more full the NAT table.

NOTE: Sky Q was going to use power line to link mini boxes at one time, don't believe it does but a small chance there is some quirks when they are connected to mains that also has HomePlugs running on them.

Boils down to you doing things like turning off and unplugging lots of stuff and run with just 1 laptop connected via Ethernet for a few hours, if stable then turn on Wi-Fi with just one device connected and if good for a few hours then add another device.

In reply to a post by don9999:

I 'think' I need an app (prefereably on ipad) where I can wander around the house and measure wifi speeds, and perhaps idendify hot/cold spots.

I would recommend 'Wi-Fi Sweetspots' app on iOS, this measure your device's wifi link rate to your router in real-time (every sec) so you can see which parts of your home has wifi issues.

https://s13.postimg.org/6ugy7odyv/wifi_sweetspots.jpg

Edited by baby_frogmella (Sat 10-Mar-18 16:02:25)

Here's a few suggestions. Firstly untick enable IPv6 LAN side on your router. Second make sure powerline is disabled on every Q box and also your Q router (if it's running the latest firmware, there may not be a powerline tab on the router, so just check the Q boxes in this situation). Lastly move the 5Ghz channel over to 40Mhz, channel 44 with the aim that the devices you are having connectivity issues with can no longer see or connect to the 5Ghz band. It is said that Qs mesh software steers devices from one access point to another, and also steers their connections from 2.4 to 5Ghz. If it thinks there is a bad apple on the network as I understand it the Q mesh software can also block its access. Hope this helps.