Router Intermittent Pause

[Capricorn1 · Accepted solution]

From what I've gotten from the previous posts, I'm leaning toward some cabling issue, but it's possibly a faulty router. The G1100 should be able to handle up to 1GB Fios (though I’ve not tested that theory).

From one of the posts, “It pauses on wired and wireless. If the TV is trying to connect to Netflix during a pause, it fails. My caption phone stops giving me captions though it is connected to the router via ethernet. TV does not pause. The lights on the router do not change when a pause occurs.” Interestingly, the Fios TV does not pause. (Maybe the set-top box or DVR has enough buffered to handle the outage of 2-3 seconds.) I assume the coax in the picture (with the LAN light on next to the coax cable) is just going to the Fios TV device (DVR or STB), which is reasonably nearby.

If I understand how this has been installed, the fiber comes into the ONT, which is located in the basement. From the ONT, there is an Ethernet cable that was run through the floor and walls to the wall jack into which the G1100 is plugged. It sounds like the interior cabling worked at the slower speed, but at the higher speed is losing sync for some reason (such as cable length, cable quality [Cat 3 vs Cat 5 or Cat 5e, for example], or some outside interference that the lower speed could tolerate). The time of 3-5 seconds would be long enough for the ONT and G1100 to renegotiate the LAN connection.

One possible test would be to move the router and a test system (like a laptop) down to the basement next to the ONT and use only a short (Cat 5e or better) cable from the ONT to the router. (Leave the coax behind.) Run it for some time to see if the problem seems to go away. That would either point to or rule out the cabling between the ONT and wall jack as the issue of the issue is fixed or not. The problem with this test is that it probably takes out the rest of the house and there is probably no good way of knowing how long is long enough for testing if the shorter run works. On the other hand, if the network freezes with about the same frequency for the same length of time when using that short of a run, that pretty much points to an issue with the router. (Possibly the ONT.) The one sticking point in my mind is that the Fios TV doesn’t seem to be affected when the network freezes. I'm not sure what to make of that.