[RESOLVED] Sporadic Internet Connection-ADSL

[ETex Howie]

I'm having some serious issues with my ADSL connection. I'm located in a rural East Texas locale with limited internet options. My choices are dial-up, DSL thru the local phone company, or satellite. Satellite is not an option because my wife works from home using VPN. Her IT guys tell her this will not work. So, the only real chouce is ADSL. When it works, it's OK, but quite frequently, the connection fades entirely, or is so slow we might as well be on dial-up. Of course the phone company says all is well. They have changed out the modem and checked the lines, but nothing has changed. When the phone guy is here, it works fine (naturally).
I don't think it's my router, becuase all other aspects of the network are fine. I can print and access files and folders normally.
There are three PC's connected to the network. My wife's work computer and our Home computer. These two are hard wired to the router. My Dell Inspiron is connected with the internal wireless card.
Following is my IPconfig info and I've attached a screenshot of a ping and tracert results. Can anybody tell me if these look normal, or is there someting I should be concerned about.

Thanks in adavance.


Dell Inspiron B130
Windows XP Home

Windows IP Configuration

Host Name . . . . . . . . . . . . : Howards
Primary Dns Suffix . . . . . . . :
Node Type . . . . . . . . . . . . : Broadcast
IP Routing Enabled. . . . . . . . : No
WINS Proxy Enabled. . . . . . . . : No
DNS Suffix Search List. . . . . . : Belkin

Ethernet adapter Wireless Network Connection:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Belkin
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Dell Wireless 1470 Dual Band WLAN Mini-PCI Card
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-14-A5-C1-E6-4D
Dhcp Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes
Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.2.3
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.2.1
DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.2.1
DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.2.1
192.168.1.1

Lease Obtained. . . . . . . . . . : Thursday, June 07, 2007 7:53:07 AM
Lease Expires . . . . . . . . . . : Monday, January 18, 2038 10:14:07 PM

[jseidel]

Certainly this is inconvenient with your setup but have you tried simply connecting one of the wired PC's directly to the modem leaving the router out of the loop entirely? By doing this if the connection fades or drops off you can tell it is the service from the ISP or the incoming line. Since the modem has been swapped out, and I assume was provided by your ISP, it is probably not that. You can R/O the router if you remove it from the loop and the problem still happens. Did the gentleman from the phone company already try this? Frequently the ISP will blame someone else's equipment for any problems so if you take that out and it still happens then you know what's up.
J.

[ETex Howie]

Thanks for the response J.
Sorry, I didn't mention in the first post. Yes, we did try plugging the PC's directly into the modem. Same problem. We have reset modem and router numerous times. Still no joy.
Another thing I didn't mention: When we first got set up, everything seemed to work fine. A few weeks later, the phone company 'upgraded' to another switch that was supposedly closer to us. That's when the problem became really bad. Like I said, this is a 'rural' phone company (think- Larry the redneck cable guy! Don't mean to offend anyone, but the local techs seem a little out of their league. It's a fairly new service for these guys.) I'm not a network guy, but I'm not ignorant either. I'm A+ certified, altough it's been awhile since I've been a techie. Anyway....
Were you able to tell anything from the ping and tracert printout?

thanks,

H

[ETex Howie]

Sorry, I didn't mention in the first post. Yes, we did try plugging the PC's directly into the modem. Same problem. We have reset modem and router numerous times. Still no joy.

[ETex Howie]

Sorry guys, I'm having problems right now and am not sure what's going out and getting posted. I will check back tomorrow. Thanks for the reponse.

[SpywareDr]

Have you shown your ISP your tracert results? IMHO, the 300+ms response by their equipment is bad enough but that 700+ms is ridiculous. (I start getting a bit upset when the results get close to 100ms, or if there are more than say a dozen hops to get through their equipment).

What kind of results do you get with http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ (to Dallas, TX)? (Try it with both wired and wireless).

What kind of 'DSL Plan' are you on? (256K/128K, 1.5M/256K, 3M/384K, 6M/512K etc.)

[Tuttle]

I've seen similar results to the 700ms on hop 6 before -- it's just a router which is more interested in routing traffic than sending out errors. The fact that hop 7 is back to ~25ms indicates that there's no real delay being introduced at that point.

Does your router show line stats (eg attenuation, transmit power etc)? It'd be worth watching that to see if the numbers change when it gets bad. This does sound like a line fault.

I assume you have proper filtering in place, ie either a central filter/splitter professionally wired in or else an inline filter attached to everything on the line except the DSL modem.

[ETex Howie]

Thanks SpywareDr and Tuttle,
I feel a little foolish. I checked all the phone lines in the house. Lo and behold, when the technician hooked up our satellite TV, he did not put a filter on the phone line. I put one on it and my download speed at least tripled. Upload stayed about the same, but that's about where it should be. Before putting the filter on, Speakeasy was reporting my speed as less than 100kbbps down and about 200kbbs up. After adding the filter I'm getting around 320 down / 215 up. Big difference. Since my plan is 256/128, I guess that's not bad. More than adequate for our purposes. I'm going to reserve final judgement until later today. The problem was usually much worse in the afternoon and evening. So.............. thanks a lot guys! I'll let you know how it turns out.

H

[ETex Howie]

All remains well this evening, so I'm going to consider the issue resolved. Thanks for the insight everyone.

H