Internet Drops Out Randomly

Hello, recently (about the past two months) I have been having a lot of internet drop outs. Normally it will drop out for a few seconds and come back. Unfortunately this is long enough to have issues with a live stream or if I am connected to my work VPN. Sometimes it will drop out for 10-15 minutes. It always seems to come back on its own althought during some of the longer dropouts I have forcefully restarted the modem, which does not seem to help or matter.

 

Sometimes I can go 1 to 2 days with everything working perfectly. Sometimes the internet will drop out every couple minutes. I have not found any rhyme or reason for predicting the outages. Sometimes it is in the morning. Sometimes in the evening. I have even had issues at 2-3am, which I would expect to be a very low demand time.

 

When the service is working if I run a speedtest, I get ~55 Mbps / 6 Mbps, which is about what I expect considering I have 60/10 service. And if I ping 1000 times to 8.8.8.8 it has 0% packet loss with an average ping time of 10-20ms with a few spikes in the 80-100ms range. Overall not too bad. However, when the service is bad and I try the same ping test I see about 2-5% packet loss. I know ping is probably not the best test, but it is the easiest way for me to test the reliability.

 

This past Friday and Saturday were terrible (dropping about 1 minute every 5 minutes) so I did a bit of debugging. I tried the following:

 

1) Connected the modem directly to my computer to eliminate the router and/or wifi as a potential issue. No change, still about 2-5% packet loss with ping during this bad period.

 

2) Tried a different Ethernet cable from the modem. No change, still about 2-5% packet loss with ping during this bad period.

 

3) Tried a different computer. No change, still about 2-5% packet loss with ping during this bad period.

 

4) The main cable line comes into the house, goes to a splitter and then runs to my office. I tried connecting the modem directly off the splitter with a small 2-foot cable to eliminate the 30 foot cable run to the office. I tried a different splitter. I tried removing the splitter and connecting directly to the line coming into the house. No change, still about 2-5% packet loss with ping during this bad period.

 

5) I tried a different modem (D-link DCM301 and Arris SB6183). No change, still about 2-5% packet loss with ping during a bad period.

 

Is there anything else I can try? It seems like I have eliminated every variable I have control over. Also, here are the modem numbers with the normal connection (main line -> splitter -> office -> modem). Overall I think it looks okay. The receive power is a little high from what I have read, but it was ~11 dB when I was connected directly to the cable from the outside. There is no event page on the DCM301 that I can find.

 

Startup Procedure
Procedure	Status	Comment
Acquire Downstream Channel	585000000 Hz	Locked
Connectivity State	OK	Operational
Boot State	OK	Operational
Configuration File	OK
Security	Enabled	BPI+

 

Downstream Bonded Channels
Channel	Lock Status	Modulation	Channel ID	Frequency	Power	SNR	Correctables	Uncorrectables
1	Locked	QAM256	18	585000000 Hz	8.5 dB	40.9 dB	52	90
2	Locked	QAM256	19	591000000 Hz	8.7 dB	41.4 dB	77	3
3	Locked	QAM256	20	597000000 Hz	8.9 dB	41.2 dB	45	54
4	Locked	QAM256	21	603000000 Hz	9.0 dB	40.9 dB	29	162
5	Locked	QAM256	22	609000000 Hz	9.4 dB	41.3 dB	41	24
6	Locked	QAM256	23	615000000 Hz	9.3 dB	40.8 dB	67	39
7	Locked	QAM256	24	621000000 Hz	9.4 dB	41.3 dB	70	10
8	Locked	QAM256	25	627000000 Hz	9.4 dB	40.8 dB	44	19

 

Upstream Bonded Channels
Channel	Lock Status	US Channel Type	Channel ID	Symbol Rate	Frequency	Power
1	Locked	ATDMA	3	5120 Ksym/sec	22100000 Hz	45.8 dB
2	Locked	ATDMA	1	5120 Ksym/sec	34900000 Hz	46.8 dB
3	Locked	ATDMA	2	5120 Ksym/sec	28500000 Hz	46.8 dB
4	Locked	ATDMA	4	5120 Ksym/sec	15700000 Hz	47.8 dB

 

Thank You!