Internet Flash Crashes

Gandalph

How would go about checking if their internet has been flash crashing and sourcing a cause? I'm with Sky and I know I lose my internet connection for 1-2 second periods usually once an hour, can be a pain for online gaming! I'm also connected to a booster in my room if that matters.

ED E

Booster = homeplug? Repeater?

degsie

Do these 'flash' crashes happen when you are directly connected to the router?

Irish Steve

One possible is that the router is only allocating the DHCP address for an hour at a time, so every hour, it has to renegotiate the "lease" of the network connection and set it up again. There will be a way to make the period longer, but it depends on which router you have there as to how that is done.

Gandalph

degsie wrote: »

Do these 'flash' crashes happen when you are directly connected to the router?

I don't know why I never thought of that! I am currently testing at the moment and am connected directly to router wifi and it hasn't dropped so far. Could it be an issue with the wireless booster? I am usually connected through Ethernet cable to the booster when these crashes happen.
ED E it is a TP-Link wifi range extender.
Irish Steve I'll have a look into that more closely if I find out it is not the booster causing the problem.

Irish Steve

if you're connecting via WiFi, then the lease issue is even more possible, in that I think the router gives wired connections a 24 hour lease, and WiFi gets 1 hour, which would very much be a possible.

Having said that, some versions of the Sky hub don't appear to give access to the length of the IP lease, other than for IPV6, so you may have to contact Sky Support on this issue, and there may not be an easy solution, it could mean having to get an alternative router that you can fully configure, and using the Sky router as a bridge, with DHCP disabled on the Sky device.

Gandalph

Irish Steve wrote: »

if you're connecting via WiFi, then the lease issue is even more possible, in that I think the router gives wired connections a 24 hour lease, and WiFi gets 1 hour, which would very much be a possible.

Having said that, some versions of the Sky hub don't appear to give access to the length of the IP lease, other than for IPV6, so you may have to contact Sky Support on this issue, and there may not be an easy solution, it could mean having to get an alternative router that you can fully configure, and using the Sky router as a bridge, with DHCP disabled on the Sky device.

Yeh this is looking more like the case.

I've been keeping a close eye on it over the day and while the internet itself does not seem to drop but the wifi blips (falls for about half a second) every hour on the exact same minute past the hour, so 1.57pm, 2.57pm, 3.57pm, etc. 
I reset my router earlier on in the day and it has affected the drop time schedule, so now it drops 4.17pm, 5.17pm, etc.

I have been onto sky support all day (their in-app chat is pretty handy!) and I have explained all this to them and they have just come to the conclusion that I have a faulty router. They are going to send out another one but from what you are saying; it won't resolve my problem? What do I need to ask them to do?

Thanks for your help on this!

ED E

Buy homeplugs, otherwise you'll end up buying your own router and having to extract skys credentials.

Packet

Irish Steve wrote: »

One possible is that the router is only allocating the DHCP address for an hour at a time, so every hour, it has to renegotiate the "lease" of the network connection and set it up again.

Under normal operation DHCP clients issue a periodic RENEW. That prevents the lease from expiring. It would take a very badly broken DHCP server implementation to force the client into having to solicit a new lease each time. It is hard to believe that Sky would break that. It would be interesting to see a packet trace.

Riesen_Meal

Old Eircom routers used to do this, the Zyxel models, I think there was a DHCP setting that was set to 5000 and it had to be adjusted to 9999 to sort it out...

ED E

Packet wrote: »

Under normal operation DHCP clients issue a periodic RENEW. That prevents the lease from expiring. It would take a very badly broken DHCP server implementation to force the client into having to solicit a new lease each time. It is hard to believe that Sky would break that. It would be interesting to see a packet trace.

*points at repeater*