New Member
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30 Messages
DSL Service is Flapping
I've had the AT&T DSL service (25Mb/s tier) for several years. It's been rock solid. My significant other and I both work from home and have never been in danger of hitting the hard limits. We previously had cable that promised some pretty substantial throughput (upwards of 10Gb/s) which sounds awesome, except for the fact that the service was shared by everyone in the community (partyline, essentially), and had a really bad track record of going out during the day, which meant 0 Mb/s, until they got around to fixing it.
We switched to AT&T ADSL Service at 25 Mb/s, which is dedicated and shared with no one. The service has been reliable... until very recently. One evening about a month ago, suddenly all of the services in the house stopped working. No internet browsing, no streaming (television content), no making cell phone calls over WiFi (WiFi service (Edited per community guidelines), so using cell over WiFi)... to name a few. After performing a bunch of diagnostics on the ARRIS device, my theory was that either the device was malfunctioning, or there was a hardware problem somewhere upstream. I reached out to AT&T Cust Service. The gentleman on the phone spent most of the call handling me, which I'm fine with if he is ultimately able to escalate to an engineer. He spent an inordinate amount of time interrogating the device in my home (the ARRIS BGW210-700), I spent about an hour on the phone while he alleged to be running tests, he was making the case that the problem was between the ARRIS and my home network. I explained repeatedly that I had already run the diagnostics on the ARRIS and that they clearly showed that the problem was upstream. Here are some images of those diags:
Figure 1: Running the internet speed test using the ARRIS-based utility complained because it couldn't contact the Test Server, and as a bonus, notice the massive latency, 8758ms:
Figure 2: After running the suite of ARRIS on-board diagnostics, the IP test failed, indicating a possible routing hardware issue:
Figure 3: Clicking into the details of the IP Test failure yields more insight into the problem, related to access to the Default Gateway (a problem upstream from my equipment):
Figure 4: Finally, a "PING" test to google.com which was coming back with 100% packet loss, in this case showed 50% packet loss plus the latency issue.
The customer service rep eventually agreed to change out my modem, which I installed two weeks ago. The screen shots in this post were captured last evening, evidenced by the date/time stamps. The new hardware didn't fix the problem.
Would it be possible to speak with an AT&T engineer to figure out why this is happening. This morning, as I write, all tests indicate everything is functioning properly, but I suspect that whatever caused the malaise yesterday afternoon (and a few weeks go) and lasted into the evening hours (flapping service) will likely happen again. If there was a service outage due to routine maintenance, I was hoping to learn that from customer service, but customer service didn't share that when I called yesterday.
Are there any engineers on this forum? I'm hoping this detail will help bypass the customer service support tier.
gr8sho
ACE - Professor
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4.5K Messages
7 months ago
@mag2023
With the BGW210 installed, did you get a chance to look at the timed statistics of the gateway after the large file upload was stopped? Presumably you’d be seeing large numbers of FEC or CRC errors affecting the circuit.
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JefferMC
ACE - Expert
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33.2K Messages
7 months ago
He's provided a couple of screenshots earlier in this thread. No significant error counts. Some unexplained unavailable seconds.
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mag2023
New Member
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30 Messages
7 months ago
@gr8sho -- I didn't screenshot the stats when I knocked over the router with the upload. When the Ping test (on the ARRIS) failed and the ping on my workstation started flapping, even after I killed the upload, that was evidence enough for me. When @JefferMC asked about the inversion of upload volumes vs the download volumes in my stats, I started digging into what on my network could be hammering the upstream leg. Turns out it was related to a new device I bought, and setting up iCloud service. I'd volunteer to revert back to the ARRIS and run the test again, maybe this weekend... but I'm fairly certain that any of the folks on the thread could do the same.
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