Random Disconnects

[Brinas]

Hi all,
So I have Charter Communications as my provider and for the past 2 years now there has been a recurring problem of random short disconnects. I'm going to give as much information as possible as I'm pretty desperate at this point.

First of all I notice this problem when my roommate and I are playing World of Warcraft and using Ventrilo to communicate with other players.

Here's what happens. The game continues to send signal to us. We continue to see what is going on, but suddenly are not able to communicate in the chat window or use any abilities. Basically it seems like we continue to receive signal, but can't send anything out. This is also noticeable on Ventrilo in that I will continue to hear people talking but when either my roommate or I try to talk they cannot hear us. Also it is not possible to load any webpages in a navigator.

The issue usually resolves in one of two ways. After anywhere from 30-120 seconds or so we will either get dropped from the game and have to reconnect, or a sudden rush of signal catching up will happen and things continue as normal. This is shown in vent by the things we say over the course of 2 minutes coming through Ventrilo all at once .

It seems to me what is happening is that our connection is just slowing down to the point that Ventrilo or WoW are disconnecting us thinking that our signal completely dropped. Sometimes though if the duration isn't very long we don't get dropped because the slow down doesn't last long enough.

Now here's the resolutions we've tried via Charter. They've replaced all the wires/connections in the house at least 3 times. They have replaced the cable to the house. They have tried burying the wire in the back yard. They have tried replacing the modem. They have tried connecting one machine to a completely different modem. They have tried watching the signal with a "Cricket". For a while we thought that maybe this had to do with the cold weather and "suckout" (or whatever its called), but it's actually been rather warm for a few days.

There doesn't seems to be any pattern to it. It can happen at 6 am before work. 10 am on a weekend, 6pm, 11 pm, pretty much any time of day.

This went on the first time for about 4 months in the winter, then seemed to be fixed on its own. Then it happened again for a few months then seemed to fixed with the third wire replacements in the house. It just recently started again, and it's extremely frustrating.

It's not a big enough signal loss that it registers in their system, or that any of the neighbors would likely call to report it. Most likely they don't even notice it unless they happen to be loading a web page at the right moment, or are downloading something. It only happens for 30 seconds to 2 minutes at a time. I realize it's just a game, but when you randomly get disconnected sometimes once a half hour it's really disheartening.

Any suggestions of what we can try would be greatly appreciated. It's starting to look like our only option is to switch providers because it just doesn't seem to be anything from our end.

[johnwill]

Register at DSLReports and run their Line Quality Tests. It's best to run this test with a direct wired connection to eliminate any wireless issues from the results. It's useful many times to run this test several times, and we'd like to see each of the results. Post the results link from the top of the test display page for each test run here.

The link to post is near the top of the page and looks like:

If you wish to post this result to a forum, please copy/paste this URL
http://www.dslreports.com/linequality/nil/2357195 <- sample only, yours will obviously be different!
and your IP will be disguised.

Copy/paste that link here.

Note: You will have to enable PING (ICMP) request response either in your router (if you have one), or in your computer's firewall for direct modem connections. This is very important to get the most important part of the test to run.