Broadband Dropouts

[Shawmills]

Oh, the irony of it! For a couple of years I've been having random dropouts which no-one seems able to fix, sometimes for a few seconds, today for over an hour. Best of all, while 'No internet connection' one email got through - from BT with my bill! Funny that, eh?

[ToMexD]

Unsure if this is the same issue as you have, however with my old provider I had this issue for years.

It would be sporadic with no real pattern to it. It got to the stage an engineer and myself went through my routers logs (after-market router), to try and see if there was anything we could pin-point or see any patterns. One thing we did notice was the DHCP lease was failing randomly (which I had known about prior), and while the line was still up and the connection to the exchange was up, the DHCP leasing was failing, so I had no IP address, so no connection.

Once the engineer brought this information back with him to the exchange, they identified an infrastructure issue and fixed it. After that I never had the random drops anymore, and to this day I havent had any issues. This was resolved approximately 1 year ago after suffering the issue for the previous 5 or so years.

I will go and see if I can find the forum posts on the other providers community and get back to you. Leave it with me.

[ToMexD]

Just an update, found some of it, although much of it is via PM's. The issue was the DHCP leasing on openreaches side.

There was another DNS issue at the same time with similar symptoms, however that was at 1am every morning for a wide swathe of customers. The forums were on fire that week. The issue was resolved fairly quickly in comparison though, the advice back then was simply change the DNS servers your using to another provider, like google or comodo, until the issue was fixed. The DNS issue was mid-to-late 2019. My issue was resolved at the end of 2019.

Edit: Here is one of the posts from one of the threads on the forum I made at the time:

-----------------

<provider> have a huge issue with thier DHCP, I told them this years ago - and I have a router that actually reports these issues back to me, its an industrial-level router. Unfortunately it sounds like you are suffering these issues. If you have the means, use a router that can report it (not many do, I'm sorry to say), and post the logs back here. I still get the DHCP errors, they ignore them, but gave up reporting them many moons ago as they decreased from a few timeframes a day to probably once a day, after they made significant changes to my configuration their side.

Heres my log for from tonight:

Jul 22 00:53:37 syslog: wlceventd_proc_event(469): eth1: Deauth_ind <removed>, status: 0, reason: Disassociated due to inactivity (4)
Jul 22 01:34:54 DSL: Link up -> down
Jul 22 01:34:59 WAN Connection: ISP's DHCP did not function properly.
Jul 22 01:34:59 nat: apply redirect rules
Jul 22 01:35:04 WAN Connection: Ethernet link down.
Jul 22 01:35:14 DSL: Link down -> up
Jul 22 01:35:19 WAN Connection: Ethernet link up.
Jul 22 01:35:19 rc_service: wanduck 229:notify_rc restart_wan_if 0
Jul 22 01:35:24 WAN Connection: ISP's DHCP did not function properly.
Jul 22 01:35:30 nat: apply nat rules (/tmp/nat_rules_vlan3880_vlan3880)
Jul 22 01:35:31 wan: finish adding multi routes
Jul 22 01:35:31 miniupnpd[27249]: shutting down MiniUPnPd
Jul 22 01:35:31 miniupnpd[17826]: version 1.9 started

This repeats about 8 times in total, thats the most recent.

I had to battle to get my connection stable, so I do not envy your struggle getting it sorted, however I sincerely hope you do.

[imjolly]

@Shawmills 

When your connection drops does the light on the hub change colour from blue?

If problem is with device lease time then change the lease time in hub manager from 1 day to 21 days

[Shawmills]

Thanks ToMexD, that sounds interesting - it seems as if I need to get the engineer in.  I would have replied sooner but the broadband was down, having a 10 minute rest! 

[Shawmills]

No, the hub stays a lovely steady shade of blue, which had me  wondering if it was a fault on the desktop. 

You may have worked out that I understand very little of all this.

[DavidM]

Hi @Shawmills and thanks for posting.

Sorry you're having a few problems there. How are you connecting? Is it wireless or cable?

Cheers

David

[Shawmills]

Via a TP link. My BT box is on the ground floor while desktop is 2 floors up! TV runs off TP Link and never drops out. Icon on desktop shows we have an internet connection when we haven't but changes after a pause. All this adds to my general bewilderment! 

[imjolly]

are the tplink powerline adapters?