M

Visitor

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3 Messages

Monday, April 18th, 2022 1:43 AM

Closed

Intermittent micro-disconnects from connectivity.

Hey folks, I don't really have a better way to phrase the titled issue.

Let me give you the history though:

In August, I began sporadically losing connection for exceptionally brief periods of time (the longest was 8 seconds, but most are in the milliseconds) - it gets worse because this isn't producing any logs or weird packets. It happened for two months, ending sometime in October with no comment from Xfinity support.

I have no way to show that it's happened beyond that my Zoom meetings will randomly hang (audio, visual, or both) or, worst case, disconnect. I lose connection from game servers while playing a variety of games on a variety of platforms. My Twitch stream is interrupted multiple times in a session (my record is I believe 9 times in one 4-hour stream). It happens so fast I never see any sort of indicator of lost connection on my taskbar.

Additionally, I've run a variety of suites, watched my traffic with Wireshark, and more. Background: I used to be CCNA and Net+, so I still have all that. None of my logs or tools show anything weird. No abnormal amount of traffic, no excessive dropped packets, no odd RST packets. Comcast also claims there is nothing amiss from their end with remote diagnostics.

Steps taken during those two months, to no avail:
Power cycled the modem, of course

  • Replaced ALL cabling with known-tested-good
  • Replaced my modem.
  • Had three (3) separate techs come out to look at the issue and found nothing (unsurprising, given how intermittent it is)
  • Across those 3 appointments we tried bypassing the wall outlet to connect directly in my service cabinet, tested the signal at various points both in my unit as well as the cabinet on my floor and the demarc.

So.. I gave up. I stopped contacting Xfinity, they couldn't do anything so why bother? And then, suddenly, it stopped having this issue mid October. I kept running my sniffers and traces and logging for a bit longer, but nothing seemed changed from what I gathered during the 2 month issue.

So, it's done, right? Great? No. On Friday 04/17/2022, I began having issues with some of my telework software. Saturday I had three disconnects while live on Twitch. I had several today, including less than 10 minutes ago. I've once again checked all of my logging and have booted up my tools... nothing, once again, is showing up.

Ideas? Bonus points if Xfinity chimes in here or creates a ticket - I'm sick of having to go through their live chat system first.

Problem Solver

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948 Messages

3 years ago

You don't specify what equipment you are using, but i experienced a similar problem, i am using a mb 8611 modem and a asus rt-ax86u router, like you no weirdness in logs etc, brief connection loss, anyway i discovered by accident, it was caused by my router changing channels, it was set to "Automatic", i set it to manual, picked a appropriate channel and bandwidth, all the weirdness disappeared, my uptime is around 6 months with no issues or disconnects, of course this was with my wifi, i believe there is no weird stuff in the logs because its doing a normal function, just not executing it as smoothly as it should and not really a error...

(edited)

Visitor

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3 Messages

@jlavaseur​ Thank you for the response! Unfortunately, I'm on a Motorola MG8702, directly connected (wired) with the primary machine in question, so it wouldn't be a channel switching issue

Official Employee

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1.8K Messages

Hello, @MorganLeThey, it's important that we do all we can to make sure we get your connection working properly. I know you have done a ton of wok replacing cables, and equipment so I don't want you to go through the same steps over and over again. Especially since our techs have been out there a few times as well. Something that comes to mind is testing directly to the modem on another PC. It sounds like you use a work computer so I I thought that would be the easiest step to take. If you don't have the option to use another PC are you able to let us know if you tried bypassing any VPNs or firewalls if you have any in use? 

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Visitor

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3 Messages

@XfinityJosephA

Hi Joseph - I didn't get an email about this response. Sorry for the delay!

I can confirm that it occurs even with firewalls disabled and I'm not using a VPN. I can confirm it happens with a different machine connected directly to my modem as well, but it's exceptionally intermittent in either case.

I also determined that I'm not, in fact, losing complete connectivity - at least not always. It seems like it might be protocol specific or at least limited to TCP traffic? I often can continue to both hear and transmit audio during these interruptions. Outgoing video (Discord, Twitch, Zoom) and inbound video (Zoom, Twitch, streaming services) are always impacted. Connection to services/games are similarly uniformly impacted/disconnected. Zoom also gives me the warning that "your internet connection is unstable" SOME of the times. Another set of logging during a couple recent instances again showed no particular anomalies in the packet traffic. It is not dependent upon time of day or any sort of weather fluctuations either.

Hopefully some of that is helpful or gets us pointed closer to the right direction?

Retired Employee

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1.1K Messages

Thank you for confirming that this is in fact affecting other devices as well. I would like to take a closer look. 

 

Please send me a private message with your name and address to get started. 

 

To send a Private Message, please click on the chat icon in the top-right corner of the screen, next to the bell icon, and then type or select "Xfinity Support" to initiate a live chat.

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