I'll try to make this not a longer story than it needs to be, but sorry, it's kind of long.
Many times a day, sometimes only a couple, sometimes 10+, wireless devices in my house lose internet connection for about a minute. All devices are dropped simultaneously. There are a lot of them: smart phones, computers, smart speakers, audio and video streaming devices, a thermostat, light bulbs, etc. I can't of course check them all every time in one minute, but as far as I can tell they all stop working and resume a minute or so later.
CL has been here three times to try to resolve the problem. They've done some wiring upgrades and they say the signals are all good. The problem has not been improved by this work. I have tried two different modem/routers (ActionTec C1900A and ZyXEL C1100Z) and the problem is more or less the same with either.
When the failure occurs there is no indication in the modem lights - they are all green and solid or flickering as normal. There is also no error in the modem system log. I conclude the DSL connection is not what is dropping.
The subject line says "every two hours". It's not exactly that, but why I mention it is because I think it should be a clue to somebody, though CL has never cared when I try to drive that point. I run a little ping loop on one of the laptops that logs when the network goes down. I ping several different addresses, and only report it as a failure if pings to 5 different sites fail. The log shows errors happening in the same minute of the hour, very often two hours apart, sometimes 4 hours, occasionally 1 hour, and occasionally a gap longer than two hours. But the occurrence at the same minute is very clear. I'll see the error logged at 2:57, 4:57, 6:58, 8:57.... maybe a few more. Then a gap, then it will start up again on a different minute. I have 8 days of log I could send but I don't think it would tell more than what I've said.
I've been at a loss to have a guess what could cause this in my house. So I have believed it has to be somewhere upstream in CL land. I have not enough expertise to have a guess what it could be.
Then there's one new datum that causes me to begin to think again maybe it's not a CL problem after all. All the devices in the house are normally wireless. So for the past couple days I've plugged the laptop that runs the ping loop into the modem/router with an ethernet cable. I have not seen a failure since then, although there continue to be errors with the wireless devices. So maybe being hard wire connected bypasses the problem. So it seems anyway. Still, what could kill the wifi for a minute every two hours?
I want to fix this problem. It's been going on for many months, maybe a year+, and has gotten pretty annoying. I am close to flinging money at it by switching to a mesh wi-fi system and put the modem in bridge mode, just use it as modem, on the idea that maybe it's a crappy wi-fi router but maybe the modem's DSL technology is OK.
Looking for a guru with an insight about this. Any takers?
Thanks - Bill
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