internet issues in falls church/mclean - change in the network?
titleistball
Newbie

**first off - sorry for the long message**

has anyone in the mclean greens subdivision of falls church/mclean noticed degradation of internet service since this past saturday morning?  three of my neighbors have the same symptoms as i do with our internet service being very spotty with major delay and slow response.

it all started on saturday 8/7 - turned on my computer and couldn't get google to come up.  tried yahoo, hotmail, washingtonpost...nothing.  the browser just sat there.  just to note, i was fat, dumb and happy with my internet access the previous night before turning off my pc - yes, i turned off my pc on friday night without making any changes to the registry, configuration, etc.

to make a long story short, i've called tech support 6 or 7 times and everytime, they've run their "tests" to my ont, router, etc without a problem.  so they say it's a problem with my computer.  when i told one tech that my neighbors are experiencing the exact same problem, he suggested that it might be a "coincidental" problem with all our computers.  what?

one of my neighbors has a theory that some sort of traffic shaping was turned on over the weekend and anyone with an old actiontec or dlink router is probably being affected because the network is dropping large packets.  it sounds like a good theory, but none of us can convince tech support to escalate this to a network group to look at a downstream router configuration to see if any routing or filtering has changed or if any qos features have been turned on.

in the meantime, i wait for a new actiontec to be shipped to the house...any ideas out there?

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Re: internet issues in falls church/mclean - change in the network?
lasagna
Community Leader
Community Leader

Assume you tried rebooting the router and the ONT?  And then rebooting your PC?   PC hardwired or wireless?

Do the reboot thing and then from a hardwired PC, post a trace route to a known location or two on the internet (like google or cnn) as well as some ping tests.

tracert www.google.com

ping www.google.com

ping -l 1024 -f www.google.com

ping -l 1472 -f www.google.com

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Re: internet issues in falls church/mclean - change in the network?
titleistball
Newbie

yup - had the ont and router reset, rebooted my computer...

so here's an update - just as i received my new router, my neighbor called to inform me that there were not 1, but 2 verizon trucks on her street.  we decided to see what was going on and by the time i walked over to her house, one of the trucks had left, but lo and behold, her internet connection was back to normal. 

we went to see if we could talk to the other tech, but nobody answered the door.  i'm going to try and get an answer from the other neighbor.  my one neighbor's husband used pingplotter last night to see what was going on.  he saw that a ping of greater than 256 bytes would die at the 4th hop away from the house...you guessed it - one of the routers in the verizon cloud.

i'd really like to know what one of the field techs saw on his test sets since tech support doesn't have a freakin' clue and can't put 2 and 2 together.  really, if there are multiple trouble calls from the same area (and which could probably be traced back to the same pon), could it really be a coincidental problem with all of our computers at the same time?  one of the tech support guys i talked to actually suggested that was the problem.

well, guess i'll replace the router - can't hurt to have shiny equipment with that new car smell 🙂

p.s.

speedtest yesterday (after trying to reach the website 4 times) was 22k down, .011k up

speedtest today was 13.x meg down, 1.8m up

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Re: internet issues in falls church/mclean - change in the network?
Hubrisnxs
Legend

it's probably REAL close to 100% garuntee, that the 4th hop on your trace route isn't located physically on your street or within blocks of your house.    

If you and all of your neighbors had a problem that was tied together, then whatever the tech did for your one neighbor (if it was internet related at all) should have fixed your problem too.  

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Re: internet issues in falls church/mclean - change in the network?
birddream
Newbie

I live in Pimmit Hills, and I too have noticed times within the past week when it's taken a long time for a webpage to load such as google, which I have set to my homepage.  I thought it had to do with my weekly hard drive clean, but when I saw this it made me think more, since you must be very close to me.  I just got my Fios connected 3 weeks ago.

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Re: internet issues in falls church/mclean - change in the network?
Hubrisnxs
Legend

I've noticed, from experience, that internet explorer takes a little time to load, where other browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox are noticeably faster.

try downloading google chrome, it's free and may be a lot faster like it is for me.

www.google.com/chrome 

even tends to be faster than firefox from what I can tell.  

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