A friend needs help with internet problem.

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PNut12345

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A buddy of mine is having some very strange problems with his internet.

To summarize:

He switched to U-Verse a while ago, things were great at first, then he started having problems gaming...pings in the 1000's of ms, etc. This occurred with both wired and wireless connections. AT&T kept saying everything was fine, he switched back to Cox Communications for his TV/Net.

After switching to Cox, he had different problems. He lives in a house, not an apartment. The problem he's having now is that gaming on his 360 and PS3 is perfectly fine (wired connection to router to cable modem). His computers--all 3 of them--are lagging terribly with any game he plays, his itunes account is useless now as he can't even download individual songs without them timing out and failing. Podcasts and videos behave the same when downloading.

As I said, online gaming on his 360 and PS3 is fine, but he can't download videos or demos, his Netflix won't stream movies at all, and Zune Marketplace movies won't download or stream.

Cox has replaced his cable modem twice (Scientific Atlanta and Motorola Surfboard x 2), but they say that everything is A-OK on their end.

The strange thing is, these problems persist whether he goes through the router (wired or wireless) or if he plugs a component directly into the modem itself, bypassing the router altogether.

He's at his wit's end, because Cox won't or can't do anything to fix it. He did say that he started having issues with UVerse after they boosted the speed, but he's unsure if that's what caused the problem or not. Also, prior to him switching to UVerse he had Cox and had zero problems.

Any help would be appreciated. I can get additional info upon request to help resolve the matter.
 
All these problems you are describing don't match up. If he has a wired connection to the router and games are fine then he is neither having packet loss nor latency issues as the online gaming experience would be total rubbish if he did. That would exclude the wired connections of those devices which I assume are 100Mbit from the problem.

Moving on to PCs, are they wired as well or wireless? Are their adapters in auto/auto for speed and duplex? Have you measured the packet loss and latency between hosts on the same subnet wired to wired? If you are having issues with a host even when you plug it directly into the cable modem I'd be inclined to believe it was the host's NIC that was causing the issues and not the cable modem or the router.
 
mattjw916 said:
All these problems you are describing don't match up. If he has a wired connection to the router and games are fine then he is neither having packet loss nor latency issues as the online gaming experience would be total rubbish if he did. That would exclude the wired connections of those devices which I assume are 100Mbit from the problem.

Moving on to PCs, are they wired as well or wireless? Are their adapters in auto/auto for speed and duplex? Have you measured the packet loss and latency between hosts on the same subnet wired to wired? If you are having issues with a host even when you plug it directly into the cable modem I'd be inclined to believe it was the host's NIC that was causing the issues and not the cable modem or the router.
Click to expand...

That's just it, none of it appears to make any sense.

The PC's are normally on a wireless network, but he has the same issues if they're plugged directly into the modem, bypassing the router altogether. I'm not sure if his online PC gaming improves or not, but his ability to DL large files is completely screwed up regardless of how it's connected.

It's the damnedest thing.
 
In the end, all "network issues" can be attributed to a specific event or cause. If you swap everything out and still have periodic problems I'd be more inclined to believe it was your ISP. Right now I think that is unlikely.

Is the wireless secure? Are you getting wtfpwned by some botnet? Is someone running a seedbox at the location, etc, etc...

There's no "magic" involved in having a low latency and stable network. Keep looking for the cause of the issue since nothing you listed here seems to indicate a specific problem.
 
so 1 pc plugged directly into the modem gives you the same issue as everything going through the router?
(no switches/hubs/etc in between, right?)

Have you made sure your NIC drivers are up to date?
 
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