Question regarding router

[lilly]

Hi,

Im a student currently living in a 9bedroom flat :beer: and i'll apologise in advance for this long winded pretty vague post.

When we moved in we went with o2 broadband and got upto 20meg package which seems pretty nice. All of the speed tests i've done seem pretty consistent and what they should be. Some people on our wireless network are getting frequent cut outs, with two acer laptops on vista seeming to say they are being dc'd and rec'd every 5seconds, any known issues there? I understand that the odd drop out can just be due to bad signal or interference etc so I tried changing the broadcast channel to no real difference.

While I used the wireless (I was close and was directly above it) I never really got cut outs, however the broadcast at irregular intervals would change to ad-hoc only and so none of us could connect unless we refreshed the router or retracked the correct connection again in our wireless utilities. Any ideas?

Another point.... I moved onto using an ethernet cable and mainly only noticed through gaming that sometimes my ping can seem low and then high and unstable. This I know could be just usage of bandwidth between 9 people but i'm not sure.

But my main question really about all of these issues is, because o2 sent just a pretty standard router, is there any possibility that the traffic to the router, not the actually bandwidth is causing any of these problems? I dont want to upgrade router only for none of the problems being its fault.

Thanks.

[Super Nade]

Welcome to the forums! :)

The first thing I would do is to check the cable for kinks. I would use Cat6 if you are going the wired route. Next up would be to check and see if the router is heating up. Heat can cause all kinds of problems. When I had a heat issue (a couple of years ago), Silversinksam (a fellow moderator) suggested that I mod the router to cool it, which I did and it solved the issue.

[ppe1700]

Hi,

Im a student currently living in a 9bedroom flat :beer: and i'll apologise in advance for this long winded pretty vague post.

When we moved in we went with o2 broadband and got upto 20meg package which seems pretty nice. All of the speed tests i've done seem pretty consistent and what they should be. Some people on our wireless network are getting frequent cut outs, with two acer laptops on vista seeming to say they are being dc'd and rec'd every 5seconds, any known issues there? I understand that the odd drop out can just be due to bad signal or interference etc so I tried changing the broadcast channel to no real difference.

While I used the wireless (I was close and was directly above it) I never really got cut outs, however the broadcast at irregular intervals would change to ad-hoc only and so none of us could connect unless we refreshed the router or retracked the correct connection again in our wireless utilities. Any ideas?

Another point.... I moved onto using an ethernet cable and mainly only noticed through gaming that sometimes my ping can seem low and then high and unstable. This I know could be just usage of bandwidth between 9 people but i'm not sure.

But my main question really about all of these issues is, because o2 sent just a pretty standard router, is there any possibility that the traffic to the router, not the actually bandwidth is causing any of these problems? I dont want to upgrade router only for none of the problems being its fault.

Thanks.


hey!! finally someone with the same set up as me :)

im using o2 broadband which is actually a company called Be.
o2 shipped me a massive 'customised' speedtouch (i dont really rate them tbh) if your a new customer, you get a different "wireless box" which is a bit more fancy, but ive never looked at the config or the menu..

anyway,

how many of you is using the internet at once, and what are they doing???

with o2, you get a 1.3mb upload speed, - im on the 8mb package and i get 1.1mb upload. i think you get faster if you pay more. if the upload is being maxed out then it will really slow the internet down. this is because when you type in a webpage, the request is sent off first before you even download. i find that if im maxing out my upload, it really slows it..
sp basically if someone is seeding or whatever from within your network then this might be why everyone has trouble.

what you should do here is disable uPnP on the router if you can, and dont allow any exceptions unless you really need them. this may stop torrent programs from dynamically opening up a port on the router and letting them seed.
another simple way is to tell them to not do it lol

remember you cant really use pings to test the stability of your network, unless your actually getting cut off and your using pings to see when your cut off.
pings dont get prioritised so they may be dropped if there is large ammounts of traffic.


regarding the wireless, i dont know how good speed touches are with wireless..are the vista machines fully up to date?
you need to download a program to open on your laptop that will show you what channels are being used in the area, so you can pick on well away.
the channels that dont overlap are 1,6 and 12.
but even in my home i couldnt pick a channel that was completely on its own but i still picked one that no one else was using.
mine works fine. except a belkin pci card i bought DONT work with it at all. but my work laptop is fine through walls and floors!!

so, the disconnecting could be, drivers, interferance, or the laptops wireless card itself..

you could try re-positioning the arial and or the router..

how many people connect wirelessly together? you do have some sort of security on it dont you? you dont want your neighbors jumping on as well!

hope i have helped you some! :)

p.s. what sort of flat has 9 bedrooms! if its anywhere in london ,wait til the prices go back up and sell it up! you will make a mint lol

[ppe1700]

Welcome to the forums! :)

The first thing I would do is to check the cable for kinks. I would use Cat6 if you are going the wired route. Next up would be to check and see if the router is heating up. Heat can cause all kinds of problems. When I had a heat issue (a couple of years ago), Silversinksam (a fellow moderator) suggested that I mod the router to cool it, which I did and it solved the issue.

my netgear router sits on top of a pc, and is next to a floor to ceiling glass window. in the morning i wouldnt be surprised if it goes up to 70c internal temp.
cisco ASAs sit at 55c doing nothing,. ive had no real problems
i had to replace the adsl splitter the other week, as it kept losing sync with the line..

[Trap05]

It's just common sense though heat and electronics don't mix well.

[ppe1700]

It's just common sense though heat and electronics don't mix well.

i agree, was just giving an example

[lilly]

Welcome to the forums! :)

The first thing I would do is to check the cable for kinks. I would use Cat6 if you are going the wired route. Next up would be to check and see if the router is heating up. Heat can cause all kinds of problems. When I had a heat issue (a couple of years ago), Silversinksam (a fellow moderator) suggested that I mod the router to cool it, which I did and it solved the issue.

Hi, thanks,
The two of us that are using cables are currently using outdoor cat5 I think. We are directly above where the router is so we (dodgily) dangle them down to the floor below and through a window, the windows are quite old and have some grooves etc that we use to limit the damage but they still are getting kinks in the cable. Maybe we should get out our drills and files? :)

I will have to wait til the problems happen again and go see how hot the router is for the heat problem though.



how many of you is using the internet at once, and what are they doing???

how many people connect wirelessly together? you do have some sort of security on it dont you? you dont want your neighbors jumping on as well!

p.s. what sort of flat has 9 bedrooms! if its anywhere in london ,wait til the prices go back up and sell it up! you will make a mint lol

Well although theres 9 of us here, rarely do we all use it at once (browsing at least). Maybe some people leave some downloads going. Most people just use it for browsing and the occasional download (some torrents included im sure) what they download I dare not ask!

7 of the 9 of us use wireless, the router came default with WEP encryption, tried to change it to WPA but some people had adapters that had problems with the compatibility so I changed it back. There are lots of other wireless networks around (as we are in the city centre more or less) so finding a unique channel is hard.

Im afraid we dont own the flat, we just rent :) and I don't know if you've seen student accomadation before but it would need some serious revamping to sell on!

Thanks for everyones help.

[ppe1700]

ah. the old dangle out the window trick :D

outdoor cat5? is that have a super thick plastic shield or something?

let us know how you get on.
and nope! i left school at 17 and have worked full time ever since, with night school or the "one week course" thing. never been in student accomodation.. bet its a laugh tho :)

[lilly]

yeh it does have a pretty thick plastic coating.

Last night on my wired connection it said that the network cable had been unplugged and for a short time I couldnt get onto the internet so I went down and the router was quite hot, I cant be sure if its hotter than any router might get, but it was hotter than when its working ok. After a few minutes it reconnected by itself.

[ppe1700]

yeh it does have a pretty thick plastic coating.

Last night on my wired connection it said that the network cable had been unplugged and for a short time I couldnt get onto the internet so I went down and the router was quite hot, I cant be sure if its hotter than any router might get, but it was hotter than when its working ok. After a few minutes it reconnected by itself.

does anyone of your flat mates have a black stick with white tips. looks a bit like this: http://www.magicity.com/images/8Cam-MagicWand.jpg

jokes aside, dodgy cables can do that. i have even seen a dodgy cable make a pc not be able to get a dhcp ip address, but otherwise works ok.

if no one else has that issue, you could try a different cable to see

[lilly]

Tonight the internet started going very slowly, trying to stream things that i'd watched earlier started just giving 'connection problem' so I pinged my router and got strange results like these.

Reply from 192.168.1.254: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.1.254: bytes=32 time=5ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.1.254: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.1.254: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=64

I havn't pinged my router when the connection is running smoothly, could this result be because of the router being busy/over heated etc or can it only be issues with the wire?

Thanks

[ppe1700]

That doesn't seem strange to me. Just looks busy.
What you can't to is see how much people are using bandwidth wise. What you can do is right now google adsl guide, and do their speedtest.
Then when its fine, do another speedtest from the same site.

You could either have someone raping your internet. Or a dodgy phone line.

Do you have a telephone connected to the internet line? If so can you hear any noise down it other than a dial tone?

[Wraith]

The first thing I would do is check for torrents! If one person is torrenting it will cause the issues with speed.

Make sure you dont have any freeloaders on your wifi sucking bandwidth either!

[lilly]

Yeh I think it was probably just because it was busy, us students these days dont like paying for anything so i'm sure some torrents are being used too, although ive tried to make people stop seeding.

Just had this result;

http://www.speedtest.net/result/342792202.png (http://www.speedtest.net)

Along with more or less complete <1ms to the router. Where as earliar with the higher router ping I had more like this;

http://www.speedtest.net/result/342598020.png (http://www.speedtest.net)

But this again makes me ask, would a new router improve the speed issues when its busy? Or is the limitation just with the speed of the line?

Thanks

[ppe1700]

NO, a new router would do NAFF all.
your getting the 1.3mb upload speed like i said :D
and the 17.5mb download is pretty good.

however, the 2nd speedtest is showing you what is currently left available. so i would be surprised if it was in a state where its almost impossible to use. with a download of 2.8mb and upload of 600kb its still faster than tiscali's standard broadband!

its not the router that is holding you back, its those two little wires of the phone line lol.
do you have a nice apple-type-looking speedtouch? O2 gave me a huge grey speedtouch which has never been turned on in my home..

if you want help configuring the speedtouch to help stop the downloads, i can.
O2 have their own custom firmware on the speedtouches. the vpi / vci setting is 0/101 for o2. the default on speedtouch routers do not allow you to change it to this setting (unless you can figure out command line)
also, because of this, o2 have created different user accounts on the routers to allow different things. i can find out these passwords for you if you need.

if you did decide to use another router, then all you need to do is configure the vpi vci setting. there is no username or password for the adsl.

[lilly]

Yeh its the snazzy apple looking router, Ive been into the settings pages before. Dont think I should completely cut off peoples torrent using or there might be a revolt against me being in charge of the internet :p
I guess i'll just put up with it when its rubbish and live with less people next year :)
Now just the problem of the random 'network cable has been unplugged' cut outs :)

Thanks

[JamesXP]

No QoS settings? becuase you could lower the priority of torrents/peer2peer connecitions.

[lilly]

No QoS settings?

Not sure if the O2 settings have this, or if i'd know how to.

Seem to be at quite random intervals getting cut outs for all of us one second being fine the next;

Pinging www.google.com [198.18.1.3] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 192.168.1.254: Destination host unreachable.
Reply from 192.168.1.254: Destination host unreachable.
Reply from 192.168.1.254: Destination host unreachable.
Reply from 192.168.1.254: Destination host unreachable.

Edit; On my O2 box I can see all of the ips assigned to each of our computers, some of these seem to be the same, could this create problems?

thanks

[ChronosKill]

Not sure if the O2 settings have this, or if i'd know how to.

Seem to be at quite random intervals getting cut outs for all of us one second being fine the next;

Pinging www.google.com [198.18.1.3] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 192.168.1.254: Destination host unreachable.
Reply from 192.168.1.254: Destination host unreachable.
Reply from 192.168.1.254: Destination host unreachable.
Reply from 192.168.1.254: Destination host unreachable.

Edit; On my O2 box I can see all of the ips assigned to each of our computers, some of these seem to be the same, could this create problems?

thanks

That should be the cause of the random cut outs and probably the bad speed too. I dunno the router so some one else will have to talk you through fixing it.

[ppe1700]

No QoS settings? becuase you could lower the priority of torrents/peer2peer connecitions.

i dont think speedtouch has quality of service mate.. ive never seen it!
plus, since o2 use their own firmware, i think there is even less chance lol

[ppe1700]

Not sure if the O2 settings have this, or if i'd know how to.

Seem to be at quite random intervals getting cut outs for all of us one second being fine the next;

Pinging www.google.com [198.18.1.3] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 192.168.1.254: Destination host unreachable.
Reply from 192.168.1.254: Destination host unreachable.
Reply from 192.168.1.254: Destination host unreachable.
Reply from 192.168.1.254: Destination host unreachable.

Edit; On my O2 box I can see all of the ips assigned to each of our computers, some of these seem to be the same, could this create problems?

thanks

it seems for some reason, dns isnt working correctly.
google doesnt resolve to 198.18.1.3.
this is why when you try to ping that ip, the router (192.168.1.254) replies to your ping telling you it cant get to it - because it doesnt exist!

do you get the same message if you ping a different website?
also try pinging 4.2.2.2 (a valid internet ip thats easy to remember)

if you can still NOT ping by IP, then it looks like its not DNS but loss of connection to the tinternet.
then comes the hard part - trying to find out if its BT's problem, or O2's..


(my internet has been dropping randomly for the past month(always about 11pm - 12pm when im not using it, or when im about to get off), the other night the router couldnt sync with the line and i gave up and went to bed. it was fine the next day. then last night as i was about to go to bed i noticed the adsl light on my router bright RED. BT are complete div's, o2 are friendly.. but i know either way its going to take time and if i report a problem when there isnt actually a problem evident at that time, then the call will just get closed and i would have wasted time for nothing.)

[ppe1700]

here is a dns lookup for google.com

C:\>nslookup
Default Server: wksrv02.wkcap.local
Address: 192.168.15.2

> google.com
Server: wksrv02.wkcap.local
Address: 192.168.15.2

Name: google.com
Addresses: 209.85.171.99
72.14.207.99
64.233.187.99

[ppe1700]

just thought i would let you know - ive logged a ticket with o2 about my frequent disconnections as its really annoying now.
ive even swapped my netgear for their speedtouch they gave me.. and for some reason its not letting RDP through even tho ive set it!!

o well, i'll keep u updated

[lilly]

it seems for some reason, dns isnt working correctly.
google doesnt resolve to 198.18.1.3.
this is why when you try to ping that ip, the router (192.168.1.254) replies to your ping telling you it cant get to it - because it doesnt exist!

do you get the same message if you ping a different website?
also try pinging 4.2.2.2 (a valid internet ip thats easy to remember)

if you can still NOT ping by IP, then it looks like its not DNS but loss of connection to the tinternet.
then comes the hard part - trying to find out if its BT's problem, or O2's..



Ill try to test this the next time it cuts out, trouble is it seems so random at times and can be fixed right away again so I might not be quick enough :p At the moment there seems to have been just an issue that one of us is being disconnected and unable to get back onto the router at a time (possible the IP issue i mentioned? or just maybe the routers too busy).

Good luck with your own problem, let alone trying to fix mine as well :D but yeh I agree at least o2 are pretty friendly :)

[ppe1700]

lilly, the ip 198.18.1.3 is some part of the speedtouch router itself. when i plugged mine in, and got disconnected, my web browser was being forwarded to that address...

2ndly, O2 have increased the noise margin on my line to stop me being disconnected.. but in turn this means im getting 3.2mb download now :( :(
i had my telephone socket extended which would cause a bit more noise, but i didnt know i would lose that much speed!
im going to ask when they call me today, if we can go through the training phase again.
- the training phase is the first week you have your adsl line connected, they constantly monitor and test the line to see how much they can throw at you.

did you ever have changes to your telephone line recently? im wondering if your disconnections are a similar reason to mine?

02 are helpful enough tho. but i want my 6mb back :(

[lilly]

Well when we moved in we had to move to a BT phone line for O2 to even listen to us having internet here. Tonight I had some strange behaviour just by being able to connect to certain websites and not others. I think i'll email them and see what they think about it, hopefully they're nice enough and helpful to hopefully resolve it. But same here I think any loss in speed really would just make the problem worse.

[ppe1700]

i think you have one of either two things going on here..
either, people are torrenting, meaning they are uploading a lot;
(if you max out your upload, it will still slow you down getting to websites as the request to get to the site will be queued up, or possibly dropped.)
OR
you may be losing the sync with the dsl line causing you to get cut off momentarily until the router sorts itself out.

adsl connections dont last indefinately... there always seems to be something that makes them drop, even after a week for some random reason they may drop and then immediatly connect...
o2 seem to push the maximum speed they can down the line.

my advice to you is to call them up, tell them the problem, and see what they say, they can check over whats happening on your connection and get back to you - if its being maxed out they should be able to tell you that, also they are able to see how many connections you are having..
i wouldnt tell them how many people you have using the one line though, the terms and conditions state this is for home use only, and must not be used for business - they may think you are using it for business if you tell them you have 9 people using it!
also, they say you are not allowed to connect to your line from somewhere else, but i host a website from mine so... lol

one other thing, the telephone line is just BT's copper wire.. in the exchange its o2's equipment..

[lilly]

Ok thanks a lot, you've been very helpful and I hope you fix your cut outs! I guess I can ask O2 how to create some settings for limiting torrents apart from checking up on everyone everytime it slows :) Ill update the post if I get any results from O2.

Thanks

[ppe1700]

i just re-read my post..
by 'connections' i mean disconnects and reconnects.

o2 still aint called me, ive been too busy to call them though lol

[greyharte]

(my internet has been dropping randomly for the past month(always about 11pm - 12pm when im not using it, or when im about to get off), the other night the router couldnt sync with the line and i gave up and went to bed. it was fine the next day. then last night as i was about to go to bed i noticed the adsl light on my router bright RED. BT are complete div's, o2 are friendly.. but i know either way its going to take time and if i report a problem when there isnt actually a problem evident at that time, then the call will just get closed and i would have wasted time for nothing.)


i know this is a strange question, however, do you live near a major government facility (buckingham palace may qual btw, im not sure besides living quarters what other government offices reside there) this can also include police and large fire stations also large corporate headquarters?

the reason i ask is that at 1 time i used to work tech support for a major isp/dsl provider and encountered a situation where the member (lived in PA i beleive) would get disconnected everynight at approx 2am (they were night people) and couldnt reconnect again untill after 6am. after multiple tickets (of course always service checked during regular buisness hours) and after much research i found out that they lived 3 blocks from a major remote police hub and a huge factory of some type. what was happening is that between the the PD network and the factory network they were robbing all the available bandwidth in the area to perform all their data and network updates during that time frame as most normal people would be in bed asleep. also found this to be true in and around Langley and the Pentagon (tho times were different as i recall was mainly an issue during normal operation hours). granted this was 3-4 years ago and they may have resolved the issue since then, but, it is something to consider, especially if it occurs consistently during the same time frame

[ppe1700]

i am now no longer getting disconnections, and my speed has returned to the usual 700kb/s download.
i called them today and told them i was happy with the net not disconnecting anymore, but the speed has decreased significantly, and he plainly told me i was wrong... so we did a speed check there and then and its back to normal lol
i asked what they did and he said it was a profile issue on their end (no idea what he meant.)

ill see how i get on. you know how i said adsl connections dont last forever, well i just checked and the connection dropped about 30 mins ago...

let us know how you get on lilly