Frequent loss of connectivity

[CicadaEffect]

Hi,

I work with another from home during the day in the week and we have consistently over many months and weeks suffered dropouts what seems like every day.  It is very disruptive with our virtual desktops over VPN and the conference calls - i.e. we have to frequently re-login with passwords and security tokens etc.

Before we leave VM and go with another supplier.  I would like to ask the good volunteers here and the official VM staff if there is anything that VM can do before we leave?

I will follow up with BQM graphs and CM stats.  Thanks in advance!

Background

Following similar issues in April / May and since the beginning of this year, an engineer came out in June and inspected my set-up.  He also checked the position in the local cabinet and fitted an attenuator to the Hub to drop the signal levels.  Another remote engineer told me some failing equipment further upstream in the network had also been replaced.  Overall there is not much improvement from my end.

Our setup:

• Hub 3.0 in Cable Modem mode
• TP Link Archer C2300 wireless gigabit router

My laptop connection:

• Cat 5 network cable
• Netgear 5 port gigabit switch

Other's laptop connection:

• Wireless 5GHz

[Molly_G]

Hey @CicadaEffect,

Many thanks for your recent posts, I'm so sorry to see the ongoing connection issues you've been having. Thanks for providing the BQMs too.

I'd like to get a visit booked in for you so we can take a closer look at what's going on here, so I'll just send you a private message to confirm a couple of details - please keep an eye on the purple envelope at the top of the page.

Thanks,

[Molly_G]

Hey @CicadaEffect,

Thanks for coming back to me via pm - this is all booked in for you. You can check on the appointment and change the date/time too if necessary via the online My VM Account.

Hopefully our engineer will be able to resolve this swiftly for you - please keep us posted on how it goes.

Kind regards,

[CicadaEffect]

Thanks Molly for arranging.

I am wondering whether I should still switch the Hub3 out of Cable Modem mode back to router mode and my TPLink device in to WiFi only to see if it makes a difference over the weekend?

[CicadaEffect]

So writing this for future reference and in case it helps others.

An engineer came on Monday 23 Aug 2021 and checked my signal levels.  This is a summary of questions / discussion with the engineer:

• signal levels needed adjusting to be more in the centre of an acceptable range to allow for tolerances in the raising or lowering of signal levels
• signal levels is what is causing network dropouts
• there are other areas in my town where there are similar issues with signal
• based on current signal levels, replace the -3 attenuator on the back of the Hub3 with a -6
• change the modulator / isolator - because of the age it may be unreliable.  This is the thing that connects the cable from outside the house to the cable inside of the house.  In my house it was hidden in an old Cable and Wireless branded box attached to the wall.
• Strip back and change the cable head that connects to the modulator/ isolator because internal copper thread looks a little corroded and coating is missing

Why did the previous engineer in June not use a -3 attenuator?  Hard to say, perhaps the signal levels back then were different to what they are now.

What would cause a change in signal levels? Many factors including pressure on the cable external, weather, but he thought probable is changing equipment for supporting 1Gbit speeds.

What should the signal levels be:

	Lower Limit	Upper Limit	Goal (middle of the range)	Sample of values prior to cable, isolator and attenuator changes (23 Aug 2021)	Sample of values today (25 Aug 2021),  after cable, isolator and attenuator changes (23 Aug 2021)  *I forgot to note down the values at the time of changes.
Downstream	-6	10	2 to 3	4.9 to 7.3	2 to 4
Upstream	35	50	42 to 43	~37? (not sure if I recorded that correctly)	40.3 - 40.5

[CicadaEffect]

oh one more thing, as suggested by a couple of people, I switched back the Hub3 to routing mode (factory reset) and turned off all wireless. 

My TP-link is now just a WiFi Access Point. For daily work, I am still connected via network cable and there's another using WiFi.

The point of this is to rule out the TP-Link being a cause of ping packet loss in the BQM graphs, as I didn't realise the Hub3 in CM mode was passing everything across.  However according to the Hub3 logs we could already see there were more fundamental errors happening before this change.

Well, just waiting now to see (hopefully) if the overall stability has improved!  Will try and remember to report back here, whatever the outcome.