Intermittent (but frequent) internet connectivity drops - next steps?

DeltaTaco · May 29, 2023

I am at my wits end with this issue, and my ISP (Spectrum) has been absolutely, frustratingly useless. A bit of background: we moved into a new house in March this year (~2.5 months before the time of this post). My router is an ASUS RT-AX55 and the modem is a Spectrum unit - model EN2251. These worked flawlessly at our previous place.

The issue we're having is that the internet works GREAT most of the time, but will sporadically completely drop the connection. Not slow it down, but drop it to the point that nothing will load. I usually will Google 'network speed test' when this happens, and interestingly instead of getting the no internet dinosaur I get a 'Google's DNS couldn't be resolved' or something like that (sorry, at time of writing things are behaving so I don't have it in front of me). That's just to say that things still appear to be loading until that error shows up instead of an immediate no connection error. These drops usually last 30 seconds - 1 minute, although sometimes can take the internet down until everything is rebooted.

Here is a brief timeline that hopefully gives a bit more detail about the issue:

Mid-March we had Spectrum come out to hook up the coax line, as all lines inside the house had been gutted when the house was remodeled. I dropped a female-female line through the floor into the basement and just asked him to run a line from their box and connect to that line.
- Potentially important: when we moved in, the coax line from the telephone pole to the box on the back of our house was melted. Unfortunately I don't have a picture of this, but the coil on the inside of the box was partially fused together and the shielding at the connector on the end had melted off. I'll come back to this later...
Issues started pretty much right away, but it was sporadic enough that it took a while to think anything of it.
- Connection drops on all devices, wired and wi-fi.
- The issue is at the modem (or earlier). All devices stay connected to the routers wi-fi, just without connection. Plugging directly into the modem does not fix the issue.
Early April I got on a support chat with Spectrum. They acknowledged that 'your modem is having some trouble internally' and tried reprovisioning it. No luck. They recommended swapping the modem out with a replacement, which I did, no luck.
When the new modem did not fix the issue, I got back onto a support chat with Spectrum where they acknowledged, once again, 'I did find some signal issues on the account'. They scheduled a tech to come out and look.
Tech arrives. He tells me multiple times that I need a new router because wi-fi 7 is out and I have a wi-fi 5 router. Says I should at least get wi-fi 6. The router literally says wi-fi 6 on top of it. I try to explain to him that the router isn't the issue and that I don't really care about that right now. I'm not convinced he was the most competent, but a few notable things did come out of the visit:
- He was appalled at how the previous Spectrum tech installed the cable run and actually didn't believe that we didn't have a random contractor do it. Apparently everything was too loose and he'd used a splitter without capping off the extra connection as well as using a splitter as an extender where there should not have been a splitter. I was hopeful that was the problem.
- He was able to show me on his reader that there were over 280+ T4 (or maybe T3 - I wish I had written this down) errors. I'm guessing that's what the Spectrum support chat could see as well when they acknowledged my modem was having issues.
- We had a brief discussion about the melted coax at the previous visit. He warned me about the possibility of an open ground/neutral which I was aware of, but he was adamant that this couldn't be a problem on the telephone pole side and could only be my house (to my knowledge absolutely not true). I have documentation where the electrical system was checked during our home inspection, and I have also checked all outlets for an open ground or neutral and all check out OK. We've also not had any of the indicative issues of some of these problems (e.g. lights flickering when running the microwave)
For about a week the internet seemed to behave pretty well. This weekend it has been almost unusable, with dropped connections every few minutes. Yesterday I was poking around again and noticed the ground wire going from inside of the Spectrum box down to a ground rod in our garden. The screw connecting the two was somewhat loose, but I don't think loose enough to cause an issue. Regardless, I tightened that up and verified continuity from the terminal on the coax splitter to the top of the ground rod. I also ran an extension cord out to that point and used my multimeter to verify that the ground rod was properly grounded, which also checked out OK. Internet has been just as bad since then so that was not the issue,

So any suggestions on where to go from here? Is there anything further I can do on my own to troubleshoot? Spectrum has been absolutely useless and I can't get anyone to acknowledge that it might be their problem (I'm inclined to believe that it IS their problem, especially since this exact hardware worked before moving). I'm pulling my hair out trying to get to the root of the problem but none of the techs that have been here want to look at anything other than inside the house. Then once they're done with whatever they did they run a speed test, see it's working at that moment, and leave.

Skiiwee29 · May 29, 2023

if you're getting DNS errors you can fix this easily by swapping DNS servers from the Spectrum provided to ones of your own choosing in your router. Popular ones are Google 8.8.8.8, Cloudflare 1.1.1.1, and Quad9 9.9.9.9. There are a large host of DNS providers out there so you don't have to use these ones, they're just some of the most commonly used.

Additonally unless they have blocked it, you can go to 192.168.100.1 to obtain logs and Signal levels. If you can get there, post your Signal levels here so we can view.

DeltaTaco · May 30, 2023

5 hours ago, Skiiwee29 said:

if you're getting DNS errors you can fix this easily by swapping DNS servers from the Spectrum provided to ones of your own choosing in your router. Popular ones are Google 8.8.8.8, Cloudflare 1.1.1.1, and Quad9 9.9.9.9. There are a large host of DNS providers out there so you don't have to use these ones, they're just some of the most commonly used.

Additonally unless they have blocked it, you can go to 192.168.100.1 to obtain logs and Signal levels. If you can get there, post your Signal levels here so we can view.

Unfortunately Spectrum locks their customers out of the modem. I'd love to log in to view signals, errors, etc. but there is no way for me to do so without looking over the tech's shoulder (which is where he showed me the slew of T3/T4 timeouts). I did update my DNS in the router's admin interface, although I doubt that does much since I'm still having issues if I bypass the router and wire into the modem directly.