Very frequent ping spikes, slowdowns, and drop outs, UNUSABLE!!! HFC connection.

[eddiechong0319]

I'm on an HFC connection on West Ryde station street NSW.

For the past week or two, the connection has become very unstable. There are very frequent ping spikes and slowdowns, but I'm not sure if they are correlated because I haven't found a way to monitor them simultaneously. I can barely play any online games or watch streams.

There're also a few complete drop outs everyday, and it resumes in about maybe 5-15 seconds. 

I don't think these events are related to peak hours because they had happened anytime during a day.

I've also observed that there's a lot of new wifi signals showing up on my phone, and half of them are sharing names in the format of "WiFi-XXXX", presumably other TPG clients using TPG provided equipment? It can't be interference because most of those are 2.4GHz channels and I'm using 5GHz.

Could it be congestion? Or someone/something messed up the connection? Please help.

[eddiechong0319]

I have also tried rebooting the router and modem, nothing has changed.

[david64 · Accepted solution]

Are these dropouts and slowdowns occurring on ethernet devices also or just wifi devices?

When you have a dropout, what happens to the Internet and WAN lights on the router?

And the lights on the NBN box?

[eddiechong0319]

Thanks for the fast reply!! I haven't tried ethernet connection yet, but I don't think it's because of wireless interference, since the ping spikes are almost always starting on the second hop --- after the router.

Also when the drop outs happen, I'm still connected to wifi, just no internet (I haven't noticed any change to the lights on the router or modem since the drop outs go away so fast).

I've also tried tweaking the 5Ghz channels and bandwidth, but nothing changed.

Another thing is that I've been using wifi and it's been fine until a week ago when these problems started showing up.

I'll order an ethernet cable today and see if it can help eliminate some possibilities. Thanks again.