Any IT guys that can give advice?

[Elmgrovegnome]

For most of a year our streaming services on the Smart TV have worked flawlessly. My kids on line gaming rarely had a glitch. Then suddenly about a month ago my TV starts buffering and my kids Xbox is lagging to the point where it is unplayable. My iPhone also.

I called my cable company and they say there is no trouble on their end and that our router is working as it should. They say it is my WiFi router. So I reinstall the router and it works great for about three hours, then starts lagging again. It’s an Orbi. I purchase a new router, a Linksys AC2200. After installation it’s working great. About three hours later it is lagging Lincoln’s games and the TV is back to buffering every fifteen minutes.

I call the cable company and tell them what’s going on and they say my speed is only 40m and a boost to 100m would be a huge improvement. So they boost it and it’s a noticeable improvement on my desktop, but my son still has lag, only less and the tv still buffers just as much along with our iPhones.

I don’t understand where the problem is. Could it be malware? Or a virus? Could someone be using our WiFi? Or could some signal be causing interference?

It worked flawlessly at 40m for months.

Oddly enough Netflix and Prime don’t buffer at all. I’m currently streaming YouTube TV. The problems occurred about two weeks after I switched streaming services. But the lag happens on my kids Xbox even with the TV off.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

 

[CGI_Ram]

This is safe.

Run this a few times and see if you get consistent results. Reply back.

Speedtest by Ookla - The Global Broadband Speed Test

Use Speedtest on all your devices with our free desktop and mobile apps.

www.speedtest.net

 

[CGI_Ram]

If you run that a few times, there is a little button for results. Don’t worry if mine look different from yours. I am on an insane connection. Curious if you see inconsistency or what.

 

[RhodyRams]

Have you tried a wifi booster?

 

[1maGoh]

For most of a year our streaming services on the Smart TV have worked flawlessly. My kids on line gaming rarely had a glitch. Then suddenly about a month ago my TV starts buffering and my kids Xbox is lagging to the point where it is unplayable. My iPhone also.

I called my cable company and they say there is no trouble on their end and that our router is working as it should. They say it is my WiFi router. So I reinstall the router and it works great for about three hours, then starts lagging again. It’s an Orbi. I purchase a new router, a Linksys AC2200. After installation it’s working great. About three hours later it is lagging Lincoln’s games and the TV is back to buffering every fifteen minutes.

I call the cable company and tell them what’s going on and they say my speed is only 40m and a boost to 100m would be a huge improvement. So they boost it and it’s a noticeable improvement on my desktop, but my son still has lag, only less and the tv still buffers just as much along with our iPhones.

I don’t understand where the problem is. Could it be malware? Or a virus? Could someone be using our WiFi? Or could some signal be causing interference?

It worked flawlessly at 40m for months.

Oddly enough Netflix and Prime don’t buffer at all. I’m currently streaming YouTube TV. The problems occurred about two weeks after I switched streaming services. But the lag happens on my kids Xbox even with the TV off.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Something changed in the environment, but nothing in your post really points to anything (which is expected since you don't know what's wrong). Unfortunately these kinda of problems are awful to track down. If you want to figure out what is causing it, the process is going to be a pain in the butt.

You could start by trying to remove devices from your network and see if the lag goes away. If it does, can investigate anything that may be different about that device compared to when everything worked fine. Software updates, new program, any new behavior by users, etc.

Everyone likes to say , "Nothing changed!" But if that was true it would still work fine. But here's the problem, it's possible that the change wasn't in your house. Maybe the ISP ran a sale recently and a bunch of your neighbors upgraded and now they're streaming their little hearts out. Or a new neighborhood started moving people in, a new business opened up, the local school started some new computer related class, etc. Now the DSLAM or equivalent local aggregation point is overloaded. ISPs have ridiculously low standards for what they consider acceptable service. A little lag doesn't matter to them at all. Hell, a disruptively moderate about of lag doesn't matter to them at all. They manage the whole network and ordered service to your house isn't guaranteed. It's even possible that they made some kind of change to increase general area stability and because of that quality is degraded for the sake of the network staying up during more adverse conditions.

But you can't do anything about ISP changes, so there's no use worrying about it.

What you can do is this:

1. Unplug/power down everything except the modem/WiFi router and the Xbox.
2. Turn on devices one by one and put them to normal use (streaming for the TV, YouTube for a PC, etc), while watching for lag
3. When you notice lag shut that device off and try another one
4. If that device causes lag too, your answer is too much stuff at once (might be an ISP thing they don't care about it behavior changed on devices from updates or new apps or whatever); repeat steps 2 and 3 until there's no new devices
5. If lag only occurs with that one device, or a small subset of devices, investigate changes in those devices (app updates, new apps, new streaming accounts, OS update, whatever). Really at this point you know the cause, but can't fix it unless you decide to stop using a device or you can revert the changes

It's possible that you have a virus or something, but that isn't the first thing that comes to my mind for this. Cryptominer viruses are popular now, but I don't know if they have them in all the devices your experiencing problems with and replacing the router wouldn't fix that for 3 hours and then revert back. That almost sounds like a cache memory on the router being too big, but it wouldn't suddenly become a problem and then do the exact same thing in a new router.

Like I said, these lag/internet slow issues are really hard to track down and even if it is the ISP, they don't care. They don't have to (anybody remember the SNL skit about the phone company?). If the kids got a new game on the Xbox or it did a system update is maybe look at that. See if the lag persists for all games or just one. But basically you're going to change one variable at a time and see if anything makes it better or worse (depending on which way you go with it; I described the or worse option, better would be to go the opposite way and leave everything on them remove devices one at a time).

 

[Elmgrovegnome]

Something changed in the environment, but nothing in your post really points to anything (which is expected since you don't know what's wrong). Unfortunately these kinda of problems are awful to track down. If you want to figure out what is causing it, the process is going to be a pain in the butt.

You could start by trying to remove devices from your network and see if the lag goes away. If it does, can investigate anything that may be different about that device compared to when everything worked fine. Software updates, new program, any new behavior by users, etc.

Everyone likes to say , "Nothing changed!" But if that was true it would still work fine. But here's the problem, it's possible that the change wasn't in your house. Maybe the ISP ran a sale recently and a bunch of your neighbors upgraded and now they're streaming their little hearts out. Or a new neighborhood started moving people in, a new business opened up, the local school started some new computer related class, etc. Now the DSLAM or equivalent local aggregation point is overloaded. ISPs have ridiculously low standards for what they consider acceptable service. A little lag doesn't matter to them at all. Hell, a disruptively moderate about of lag doesn't matter to them at all. They manage the whole network and ordered service to your house isn't guaranteed. It's even possible that they made some kind of change to increase general area stability and because of that quality is degraded for the sake of the network staying up during more adverse conditions.

But you can't do anything about ISP changes, so there's no use worrying about it.

What you can do is this:

1. Unplug/power down everything except the modem/WiFi router and the Xbox.
2. Turn on devices one by one and put them to normal use (streaming for the TV, YouTube for a PC, etc), while watching for lag
3. When you notice lag shut that device off and try another one
4. If that device causes lag too, your answer is too much stuff at once (might be an ISP thing they don't care about it behavior changed on devices from updates or new apps or whatever); repeat steps 2 and 3 until there's no new devices
5. If lag only occurs with that one device, or a small subset of devices, investigate changes in those devices (app updates, new apps, new streaming accounts, OS update, whatever). Really at this point you know the cause, but can't fix it unless you decide to stop using a device or you can revert the changes

It's possible that you have a virus or something, but that isn't the first thing that comes to my mind for this. Cryptominer viruses are popular now, but I don't know if they have them in all the devices your experiencing problems with and replacing the router wouldn't fix that for 3 hours and then revert back. That almost sounds like a cache memory on the router being too big, but it wouldn't suddenly become a problem and then do the exact same thing in a new router.

Like I said, these lag/internet slow issues are really hard to track down and even if it is the ISP, they don't care. They don't have to (anybody remember the SNL skit about the phone company?). If the kids got a new game on the Xbox or it did a system update is maybe look at that. See if the lag persists for all games or just one. But basically you're going to change one variable at a time and see if anything makes it better or worse (depending on which way you go with it; I described the or worse option, better would be to go the opposite way and leave everything on them remove devices one at a time).

Totally remove or just power down. I know the TV still buffers even if it is the only device turned on. Same with my kids Xbox. But it is definitely worse with more than one.

 

[Elmgrovegnome]

If you run that a few times, there is a little button for results. Don’t worry if mine look different from yours. I am on an insane connection. Curious if you see inconsistency or what.

View attachment 32207

Thanks, I’ll try it.

 

[Elmgrovegnome]

Have you tried a wifi booster?

The Orbi is a mesh system, but I also have a booster at the other end of the house.

 

[1maGoh]

Totally remove or just power down. I know the TV still buffers even if it is the only device turned on. Same with my kids Xbox. But it is definitely worse with more than one.

Either/or, doesn't matter. But if you already know that it does it with nothing else on its likely something related to the ISP or the neighborhood. The number of times I've been told everything is fine, only to have someone tell me a month later "Well, all the tests since {DATE} have shown that {insert obviously bad metric here} has been happening. We'll send a tech out." is pretty ridiculous. I once had Spectrum tell me that it looked like a bad line in our customer's area, but those are really hard to track down so sorry about that is there anything else we need? It took another two weeks of telling at them every day to get them to send a line crew to track it down and that happened only after an outage in the area.

ISPs are the worst.

 

[RamBall]

Not sure who your ISP is, I work for Comcast and have seen customers have issues with customer owned modems and routers. I had a customer that complained of lousy wifi speeds and when I logged onto their network the speeds were lousy even though they had a 400Mbps service. I replaced their modem with a Comcast modem and eliminated their router and they had dramatically better speeds and coverage. They were a bit upset that an IT guy talked them into all this network equipment and our 1 piece of equipment replaced all of it and did a much better job. It could also be a bad piece of cable in the attic or in the crawl space. If critters chew the cable it causes egress and ingress which will make your wifi network unstable. Any new mirrors or dense wood furniture such as a hutch can also block wifi signal.

 

[Elmgrovegnome]

Not sure who your ISP is, I work for Comcast and have seen customers have issues with customer owned modems and routers. I had a customer that complained of lousy wifi speeds and when I logged onto their network the speeds were lousy even though they had a 400Mbps service. I replaced their modem with a Comcast modem and eliminated their router and they had dramatically better speeds and coverage. They were a bit upset that an IT guy talked them into all this network equipment and our 1 piece of equipment replaced all of it and did a much better job. It could also be a bad piece of cable in the attic or in the crawl space. If critters chew the cable it causes egress and ingress which will make your wifi network unstable. Any new mirrors or dense wood furniture such as a hutch can also block wifi signal.

Service Electric Cablevision is my provider. They supply the cable modem. The homeowner provides the Wifi router. I wish they supplied the Wifi router too. Then it would be totally their problem. At first I thought it might be a firmware update to the Wifi but there weren't any recent updates.

 

[coconut]

Something changed in the environment, but nothing in your post really points to anything (which is expected since you don't know what's wrong). Unfortunately these kinda of problems are awful to track down. If you want to figure out what is causing it, the process is going to be a pain in the butt.

You could start by trying to remove devices from your network and see if the lag goes away. If it does, can investigate anything that may be different about that device compared to when everything worked fine. Software updates, new program, any new behavior by users, etc.

Everyone likes to say , "Nothing changed!" But if that was true it would still work fine. But here's the problem, it's possible that the change wasn't in your house. Maybe the ISP ran a sale recently and a bunch of your neighbors upgraded and now they're streaming their little hearts out. Or a new neighborhood started moving people in, a new business opened up, the local school started some new computer related class, etc. Now the DSLAM or equivalent local aggregation point is overloaded. ISPs have ridiculously low standards for what they consider acceptable service. A little lag doesn't matter to them at all. Hell, a disruptively moderate about of lag doesn't matter to them at all. They manage the whole network and ordered service to your house isn't guaranteed. It's even possible that they made some kind of change to increase general area stability and because of that quality is degraded for the sake of the network staying up during more adverse conditions.

But you can't do anything about ISP changes, so there's no use worrying about it.

What you can do is this:

1. Unplug/power down everything except the modem/WiFi router and the Xbox.
2. Turn on devices one by one and put them to normal use (streaming for the TV, YouTube for a PC, etc), while watching for lag
3. When you notice lag shut that device off and try another one
4. If that device causes lag too, your answer is too much stuff at once (might be an ISP thing they don't care about it behavior changed on devices from updates or new apps or whatever); repeat steps 2 and 3 until there's no new devices
5. If lag only occurs with that one device, or a small subset of devices, investigate changes in those devices (app updates, new apps, new streaming accounts, OS update, whatever). Really at this point you know the cause, but can't fix it unless you decide to stop using a device or you can revert the changes

It's possible that you have a virus or something, but that isn't the first thing that comes to my mind for this. Cryptominer viruses are popular now, but I don't know if they have them in all the devices your experiencing problems with and replacing the router wouldn't fix that for 3 hours and then revert back. That almost sounds like a cache memory on the router being too big, but it wouldn't suddenly become a problem and then do the exact same thing in a new router.

Like I said, these lag/internet slow issues are really hard to track down and even if it is the ISP, they don't care. They don't have to (anybody remember the SNL skit about the phone company?). If the kids got a new game on the Xbox or it did a system update is maybe look at that. See if the lag persists for all games or just one. But basically you're going to change one variable at a time and see if anything makes it better or worse (depending on which way you go with it; I described the or worse option, better would be to go the opposite way and leave everything on them remove devices one at a time).

Could the internet home appliances like refrigerator, dishwasher and washing machine/dryer make it worse?

 

[1maGoh]

Could the internet home appliances like refrigerator, dishwasher and washing machine/dryer make it worse?

I know this is the worst answer ever, but it depends.

WiFi signal is half duplex, meaning only one device can talk in one direction at a time. There's a lot of really complicated crap that goes on to smooth that out, but you're still limited to one device at a time. The exception to that is newer really fancy WiFi router that have multiple antennas and use multiple channels (or some such dark magic) simultaneously to allow more devices to talk at once.

So basically as soon as you get on WiFi your 40 Mbps connection is 20 Mbps. Add another device and it's 10 Mbps. Add a while family with phones, laptops, Xbox, smart TV, internet connected fridge, cloud managed dishwasher, etc and your getting pretty low.

If the fridge, dishwasher, or whatever is between a device and the WiFi router you have to contend with the signal passing through solid objects. It's not a huge deal at that scale, but it's a thing. There's legit concern that 5G signal won't work well in most homes because the signal will have trouble paying through the exterior walls of most houses (not to mention metal building or metal frame buildings which are basically Faraday cages). If that device is plugged in to a grounded circuit, it's not exactly a Faraday cage but it's a grounded metal screen between you and WiFi source. Turn that device on and now you have another source of electromagnetic signal between you and WiFi router. Interference is possible. Microwaves would be the biggest offender.

So depending on the layout of the house and which devices are around, yes. It may or may not be significantly impactful.

 

[coconut]

I know this is the worst answer ever, but it depends.

WiFi signal is half duplex, meaning only one device can talk in one direction at a time. There's a lot of really complicated crap that goes on to smooth that out, but you're still limited to one device at a time. The exception to that is newer really fancy WiFi router that have multiple antennas and use multiple channels (or some such dark magic) simultaneously to allow more devices to talk at once.

So basically as soon as you get on WiFi your 40 Mbps connection is 20 Mbps. Add another device and it's 10 Mbps. Add a while family with phones, laptops, Xbox, smart TV, internet connected fridge, cloud managed dishwasher, etc and your getting pretty low.

If the fridge, dishwasher, or whatever is between a device and the WiFi router you have to contend with the signal passing through solid objects. It's not a huge deal at that scale, but it's a thing. There's legit concern that 5G signal won't work well in most homes because the signal will have trouble paying through the exterior walls of most houses (not to mention metal building or metal frame buildings which are basically Faraday cages). If that device is plugged in to a grounded circuit, it's not exactly a Faraday cage but it's a grounded metal screen between you and WiFi source. Turn that device on and now you have another source of electromagnetic signal between you and WiFi router. Interference is possible. Microwaves would be the biggest offender.

So depending on the layout of the house and which devices are around, yes. It may or may not be significantly impactful.

Info I never knew nor suspected. Thanks a lot!