Selective program disconnects - strange!

[Osiris702]

Hello everyone,

Recently on my Bigpond 1500/256 boradband - running through a Thomson TG782T home gateway, to my laptop via WiFi; I have had programs such as Steam games, ventrilo, Skype etc being selectively disconnected from the internet for a minimum of 2-3 minutes.

When I say selectively - I mean that when running those programs either solo or simultaneously - suddenly they will be disconnected. But heres the weird part, my connection to the internet is not actually severed. When these programs 'disconnect' - I can open up my internet browser while they remain disconnected and for example go to Youtube and start seamlessly streaming a random video.

I am confident that this issue is not related to the following:

Security related

I have personally manually forwarded all ports needed for the programs to freely flow. Also have tried disabling both modem firewall and windows firewall.

Wireless Related

The most popular culprit for such problems, but tested negative. I have wired my laptop straight to the modem, disabled the wireless and even tried disabling the wireless TCP/IP for wireless. Also would be strange due to the fact I have been using the same setup relatively free of problems for 4 months.



The frustrating part about this problem is the fact it can flawlessly stay online with heavy traffic all day sometimes, and then most commonly around 7:00pm AEST - the connection to those programs becomes intermittent, unusable.

Bigpond themself of course have been less than helpful with their indecipherable accented tech support and robotic spewing of standard textbook sentences. But hopefully answers are on the way thanks to a formal complaint made through the TIO. They still have 6 working days to find my problem (Unless they are just screwing with me to make me buy a new modem) - or compensation and free solutions will be mine - even if that means giving me a new modem and upgraded service free of charge hehe.

I have already had several other less likely suggestions from other tech forums like tower congestion - but my findings keeps pointing back to the modem.

Modem Related Fixes I have tried
- Wiring to ethernet - isolating traffic to ethernet only - negative results
- Tried upgrading modem firmware - apparently up to date
- Restoring to factory default and reconfiguring networking mode (PPPoA)
- Disabling modem (and even PC) securities.


Below is a traceroute I ran to a server related to one of the programs being zapped constantly to aid any inquiries:

Tracing route to 12-129-225-73.attens.net [12.129.225.73]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 7 ms 99 ms 99 ms BigPond.BigPond [10.0.0.138]
2 23 ms 24 ms 24 ms 172.18.209.7
3 23 ms 24 ms 24 ms 172.18.65.190
4 23 ms 23 ms 24 ms 172.18.239.33
5 24 ms 27 ms 23 ms Bundle-Ether11.chw48.Sydney.telstra.net [203.45.
17.21]
6 24 ms 24 ms 24 ms Bundle-Ether6.chw-core2.Sydney.telstra.net [203.
50.6.153]
7 24 ms 23 ms 25 ms Bundle-Ether1.oxf-gw2.Sydney.telstra.net [203.50
.6.90]
8 24 ms 24 ms 24 ms TenGigabitEthernetx-0.syd-core04.Sydney.reach.co
m [203.50.13.18]
9 23 ms 24 ms 24 ms i-3-1-0.sydp-core02.bi.reach.com [202.84.144.249
]
10 173 ms 173 ms 173 ms i-2-0-1.wil-core02.bx.reach.com [202.84.144.101]

11 174 ms 174 ms 173 ms i-1-2.tlot03.bi.reach.com [202.84.251.238]
12 174 ms 173 ms 173 ms 208.175.201.5
13 173 ms 175 ms 174 ms cr2-tengig-0-7-3-0.losangeles.savvis.net [204.70
.193.49]
14 174 ms 174 ms 174 ms er2-tengig-3-1.lay.savvis.net [204.70.198.10]
15 173 ms 174 ms 173 ms 208.174.194.66
16 177 ms 177 ms 175 ms cr2.la2ca.ip.att.net [12.123.30.134]
17 174 ms 175 ms 175 ms gar5.la2ca.ip.att.net [12.122.129.25]
18 175 ms 174 ms 175 ms 12.122.255.74
19 175 ms 178 ms 174 ms mdf001c7613r0004-gig-12-1.lax1.attens.net [12.12
9.193.246]
20 * * * Request timed out.
21 * * * Request timed out.
22 * * * Request timed out.


I greatly appreciate your time in reading my ranting problems - and will value any suggestions I can make to my modem or PC that can possibly solve this frustrating problem .

Thankyou in advance,

Osiris702

[Suncoast]

This sounds strangely like the TCP RST Attack. You can read about it here. And you can install a monitoring tool here to see if you are being affected by it.