How do I go about getting this issue resolved?

For the last three weeks I have been having issues with my connection 'freezing' exactly every 30 minutes. Usually the connection recovers but sometimes it does not & the router needs restarting. Below is the Broadband Quality Monitor snapshot for the last 24 hours:

My Broadband Ping Today

You can see the packet loss spikes every 30 minutes, together with three episodes of loss of connection. During the quiet periods (1AM to 9AM & 10AM to 5PM) all PCs were turned off & only the router was powered up. The router is a Netgear DG834G.

I think can tell when this started: April 8th at about 8AM:

My Broadband Ping April 8th

Days before this are clear of these spikes. I know my line is not the best & will only support about 2.5Mbs but it has been quite reliable in the past.

How do I go about getting this looked at? I can't envisage being able to explain this to a BT script reader.

What are the router stats from the DG834G like?

The period looks too regular to be a random fault, but possibly a fault or setting in the router. Do you have a different ADSL2+ modem you can try?

Also what does Zen support say, for ADSL2+ they can usually see the line train history for the account, and believe this is visible to you in the Zen customer portal

Currently:

ADSL Link Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed 3559 kbps 601 kbps
Line Attenuation 55.0 db 32.3 db
Noise Margin 4.7 db 12.5 db

Sorry I can't get the numbers to format very well.

I'm trying to borrow another router which I may get tomorrow. I guess I'll have to try Zen support but unless they can see the graphs it's a bit difficult to convey what is going on. it just weird that it's exactly every 30 minutes - yesterday it was happening at 23 & 53 minutes past the hour.

Do you (or a neighbour) have a new device - perhaps on a timer - that 'does something' and generates large spikes of electrical noise?

Edited by deleted (Wed 07-May-14 10:45:55)

I don't have anything on a timer & the neighbours are some way away. It's not December so it can't be the Christmas tree lights.

I'm hoping to get another router but in the meantime I've checked there are no scheduled events set up in the Netgear. The only thing I can't disable is the NTP reference but I don't know how often that checks in with the reference site.

I had a very similar issue some time ago. Yours may not have the same cause, but I wouldn't immediately exclude REIN as a potential problem.

After several months and SFI visits, it was traced to a property over 50m away. They apparently had something (I never found out what as the SFI had to communicate with the occupants by post as they were out all day) that operated for 5 minutes every hour, on the hour between 3am and 10pm.

You can see the effect it had on my ADSL here.

Nice graphs. I'm not discounting REIN of course but I think I've seen my problem move in absolute time. It was happening at 23 & 53 minutes past but I think it's moved although I need to do more checking.

I wonder if this is the push I need to go fibre, although it would be galling if it suffered the same problem.

The regularity and frequency should make it easy to investigate.

Start by isolating your computers to make sure they aren't doing something that's crashing the router - disable wifi on the router and unplug any Ethernet cables.

Also try isolating telephones, sky boxes, burglar alarms, faxes, etc. Test the router in the hidden master socket and see if that fixes it.

If the above hasn't solved it, try a factor reset of the router, a firmware upgrade, or ultimately a new router.

And if that still hasn't fixed it, who knows!? Bizarre electrical interference? Rare BT fault?