Issues with BT

Hey everyone

I've been having trouble with my BT infinity (home hub 5 type A) connection, it happened randomly last saturday (1/4/17) after 6ish hours of being online gaming and watching videos just fine and has been a nightmare ever since. The connection is very inconsistent, but speedtests show my speed and ping to be normal (10ms, 70 down and 18 up) web pages will hang forever until refreshed a few times. Streaming and watching video on any of our devices (tv, wired pc, wireless laptop and ipad) all have issues even though the speeds are ok (according to speedtest.net)

I've tried changing to google DNS and port forwarded the affected games and applications but that hasn't changed anything. I'm a bit stuck as to what to do next and BT supports idea of constantly resetting the router hasn't got me anywhere this week. BT assure me nothing is wrong with the line and this hub is a new replacement that came during the last week but has the same issues as the hub before it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated i've got tools like pathping installed if anyone can help me troubleshoot this.

Got a link to one of the speedtests? e.g. http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest will give sharing links, there may be hints of something amiss that is not obvious from the figures alone

Hey thanks for getting in touch below is a current speedtest

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

Looks perfect there and latency is nice and low too.

Have you checked that the changes to DNS are in effect?

Of course its possible issues may be a specific route leaving the provider, or a video CDN having issues

I've swapped between the google DNS and the automatic ones, is there a better way of checking they are in effect?

If it is a specific route or CDN is there any way of me testing/fixing that or is that on BT to sort out?

traceroute (tracert) might help on the route

nslookup will give more detail on what is happening on DNS lookups in terms of which DNS it is using and whether its slow and failing to the secondary one.

This is tracert I just did to bbc.co.uk (hope thats ok) and an attempt at an nslookup to the bbc.co.uk IP

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Windows\system32>tracert bbc.co.uk

Tracing route to bbc.co.uk [212.58.244.23]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms BTHUB5 [192.168.1.254]
2 * * * Request timed out.
3 6 ms 6 ms 6 ms 31.55.186.177
4 7 ms 6 ms 6 ms 31.55.186.176
5 6 ms 6 ms 7 ms core3-hu0-16-0-1.faraday.ukcore.bt.net [195.99.1
27.196]
6 225 ms 6 ms 6 ms peer1-et-2-3-0.redbus.ukcore.bt.net [62.172.103.
39]
7 7 ms 7 ms 6 ms 195.99.126.101
8 * * * Request timed out.
9 * * * Request timed out.
10 7 ms 7 ms 7 ms ae0.er01.telhc.bbc.co.uk [132.185.254.109]
11 8 ms 8 ms 8 ms 132.185.255.148
12 7 ms 7 ms 7 ms 212.58.244.23

Trace complete.

C:\Windows\system32>nslookup
DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
Default Server: UnKnown
Address: 2001:4860:4860::8888

> server 212.58.246.79
DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
Default Server: [212.58.246.79]
Address: 212.58.246.79

>

Edited by deleted (Mon 10-Apr-17 17:53:55)

You need to supply a domain name to lookup for nslookup to do anything useful e.g.

C:\Windows\system32>nslookup www.thinkbroadband.com
Server: UnKnown
Address: 192.168.0.1

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: www.thinkbroadband.com
Addresses: 2a02:68:1::4
80.249.99.130

PC's run a cache system, and this can be cleared by doing ipconfig /flushdns

Tracert looks perfectly fine.

Yeh sorry realised after I posted that, here's one to think broadband before and after a dnsflush. Yeh all the tracert I've ran to different addresses always come back fine.


C:\Windows\system32>nslookup www.thinkbroadband.com
DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
Server: UnKnown
Address: 2001:4860:4860::8888

DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
*** Request to UnKnown timed-out

C:\Windows\system32>ipconfig /flushdns

Windows IP Configuration

Successfully flushed the DNS Resolver Cache.

C:\Windows\system32>nslookup www.thinkbroadband.com
DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
Server: UnKnown
Address: 2001:4860:4860::8888

DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
*** Request to UnKnown timed-out

C:\Windows\system32>

If nslookup is failing in that way, I wonder if your problems are to do with IPv6 not working properly. What happens if, when nslookup is failing as you show, you tracert 2001:4860:4860::8888 (one of Google DNS's IPv6 addresses)?

It may be worth configuring IPv4 DNS servers to see if that helps (for Google, that's 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4). IPv4 DNS servers can respond to IPv6 queries - it's just that the DNS traffic itself goes over IPv4.