Three Dropping Connection

Eoin3

I have an issue with Three I am attempting to diagnose whether the issue is with my hardware or with Three themselves.


Basically, come home in the evening, use Three broadband for a bit, works away fine and then the connection drops completely. It probably would come back fine after a bit, but I've found it much faster and more reliable to just log into the router and reboot it. Connection will be back working away again in a few minutes. Am currently doing this about once per day.


Sounds to me like it might be a hardware issue, if rebooting works? However the issue is this is my second router and the issue was the same on the previous one which was a different model. Current router is a B525s-23a which I believe I got off Ebay.


I've also gone through two SIMs, one prepay All You Can Eat, and I'm currently on an ""unlimited"" bill pay one as I thought maybe they were restricting things for people on prepay abusing the system by putting it in a router etc.



Get speeds of around 95 Mbps in the middle of the day, and around 15 Mbps during peak times in the evening.


Any ideas what the cause of this may be? An issue with the router or something on Threes side?

my3cents

Sounds typical three, given a chance their "support" will tell you its the hardware but I really doubt it.

westyIrl

What signal strengths are you getting on 4G and 3G? Iirc the bars on the front aren't all too accurate. I know on the router I have (E5186) there is a "toolbox" windows applicaton that gives various indepth connection info such as signal strengths and SNRs. A bit of googling might let you know if similar is available for yours.

My router is connected in 3G mode with three but I have router QoS dynamically throttling to minimise RTT as stability is more important to me than speed. I also had to external mount a directional antenna. Connection is up a few months so a maintained connection with them is certainly possible. I'm not sure if I would get the same consistency if I saturated the link regularly. You sound determined so I'm sure you will get it right. Either way, my first port of call would be to get accurate data on signal strength as fringe signal would certainly cause dropouts

Eoin3

Signal strength in the router UI is pretty much always very high, 4 or 5 bars. Connection tends to show as either 4G or 4G+.

Digging around the router menus I see stats for CELL_ID, RSRQ, RSRP, SINR, PLMN. Not too familiar with many of these, aside from the cell value which I presume is the ID of the mast.
Might just have a Google I guess and keep an eye on the values and compare them from when it is working and when it isn't. Maybe it changes to a different mast or some one of the other values fluctuates wildly.
Not sure if having any of this info will matter though, whether Three support would even care or if I would be able to determine from it that the issue was my side. We shall see.

Also got an Eir SIM recently so I might try putting that in my router in the next few days and see if I experience sudden drops with that also.
There is also a small chance we may get fibre in the next six months or so, which hopefully would make this headache go away, but it's far from guaranteed that that'll happen.

my3cents

OP what you are experiencing really is a "feature" of three's network. They are cheap and give away more data than is good for their network and you have seen the result.

Eoin3

I'm assuming that's probably what it is, too much contention on the network.
Am curious to know what is happening from a technical perspective though. Like is it just there are too many devices connecting in and some get dropped off? Would it not be a case that the traffic would simply be slowed (which is obviously happening to some degree anyways) but everyone should still be able to connect and send some amount of traffic/packets through?

my3cents

Eoin3 wrote: »

I'm assuming that's probably what it is, too much contention on the network.
Am curious to know what is happening from a technical perspective though. Like is it just there are too many devices connecting in and some get dropped off? Would it not be a case that the traffic would simply be slowed (which is obviously happening to some degree anyways) but everyone should still be able to connect and send some amount of traffic/packets through?

The obvious features on three's network are faster upload then download speeds - obvious sign of contention and reboots to get a connection - you go to the top of the queue for a few seconds as a new connection.

I've lived with three for more than ten years and while they have got better some things never really change.

smuggler.ie

I started experiencing similar, however, over last ~6 months had 3-4 times only. Cannot completely rule out hardware, but leaning towards Three doing "crap" on their side.
Agree with my3cents re Three got better, but their "best" now is still not good enough. Service under-provisioned/overused - hence results.
Still "getaway" for many that stuck with mobile internet due to broadband situation across country.


For relevant info re stats have a look

https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2057089101

https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2057916642
others

westyIrl

http://blog.industrialnetworking.com/2014/04/making-sense-of-signal-strengthsignal.html

is also quite useful to make sense of connection stats. (sorry if its mentioned anywhere above)

Eoin3

Thanks all for the info. Have started trialling the Eir SIM, will test it our over the coming days. Is only 10 Mbps at the moment which is slower than Three, but I haven't had it drop my connection yet. Will see what it's like during off-peak hours also. Likely to stick with Three though.

Will see if I can observe the different values for the signal as well. Compare them when it is and isn't working. See if there is any noticeable differences.

Have also just written a little script which will ping an external site every couple of seconds and reboot the router for me if it can't send out traffic for ten seconds. Hopefully that will remove the annoyance of having to log into the router myself every few hours.

smuggler.ie

Eoin3 wrote: »

Thanks all for the info. Have started trialling the Eir SIM, will test it our over the coming days. Is only 10 Mbps at the moment which is slower than Three, but I haven't had it drop my connection yet. Will see what it's like during off-peak hours also. Likely to stick with Three though.

Will see if I can observe the different values for the signal as well. Compare them when it is and isn't working. See if there is any noticeable differences.

Have also just written a little script which will ping an external site every couple of seconds and reboot the router for me if it can't send out traffic for ten seconds. Hopefully that will remove the annoyance of having to log into the router myself every few hours.

Interested to see script, especially reboot part, if you don't mind to share

scottigael

I had a similar problem year or two ago with a videogame I was playing messing with the connection and it dropping intermittently on three. After a lot of testing I found the culprit for me was the mtu size, the default is 1500 but threes is alot less and dependent on the mast, mine I changed to 1412 and it fixed the drops, it's an option you change in the router settings and you can find it through command prompt. Not sure if this is a fix for you but just food for thought.

my3cents

scottigael wrote: »

I had a similar problem year or two ago with a videogame I was playing messing with the connection and it dropping intermittently on three. After a lot of testing I found the culprit for me was the mtu size, the default is 1500 but threes is alot less and dependent on the mast, mine I changed to 1412 and it fixed the drops, it's an option you change in the router settings and you can find it through command prompt. Not sure if this is a fix for you but just food for thought.

Thats also a fix for some of the SSL connection problems you get with three.

Eoin3

Have implemented the MTU change, so we'll see if that helps things.

Not familiar with the SSL issue. What is it exactly?
Think I've had it before where it hangs for a good number of seconds when attempting to connect to a site, don't know if it relates to that. Can't recall if I checked in the browser tools what part it was hanging on, maybe it was the TLS/SSL bit.

Script is below. Python 3, running on Linux. Using library I found here. Not fully tested yet but I'll work out any bugs in the coming days.
Need to replace PASSWORD with your router password (admin also if your username differs). Library only works with certain routers.

#!/usr/bin/python3
import datetime
import os
import time

from huawei_lte_api.Client import Client
from huawei_lte_api.AuthorizedConnection import AuthorizedConnection
from huawei_lte_api.Connection import Connection


def reboot() -> None:
    """Reboot router and wait for it to come back up."""
    connection = AuthorizedConnection('http://admin:PASSWORD@192.168.8.1/')
    client = Client(connection)
    print("Requesting reboot...")
    client.device.reboot()
    print("Reboot requested!")
    time.sleep(90)


def connection_up() -> bool:
    """Check if connection is up and the internet is accessible."""
    resp = os.system("ping -c 1 8.8.8.8 > /dev/null 2>&1")
    if resp == 0:
        return True
    return False


if __name__ == "__main__":
    while True:
        current_time = datetime.datetime.now()
        print("It's {:%H:%M:%S}".format(current_time))
        if not connection_up():
            print("Failed once...")
            time.sleep(10)
            if not connection_up():
                print("Failed twice, reboot!")
                reboot()
        time.sleep(5)

my3cents

The SSL issue was at one time where on three you couldn't connect to some sites. Authentication to BoI would fail for me you'd put your password in then nothing. I think this was the problem https://www.fir3net.com/Networking/Protocols/path-mtu-path-mtu-black-holes.html but three would obviously never admit it or that there was even a problem.