Internet Keeps Dropping Out

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cyril7

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#2846926 12-Jan-2022 07:08

Hi Alistair, I just re read my previous posts, the tone was un acceptably off, my apologies.

Moving on, so today key things to gain are obviously routers in use, but more importantly DSL stats from this we can understand how much bandwidth you have to play with, but more importantly how fragile those connections are and if they would be prone to erratic dropping. And obviosly a sketch of network topology and general design.

If we put any internal network design issues aside for now, I guess things we are looking at in respect to the WAN is, is it an issue of it dropping, or is it saturating and thus stalling all traffic. I have dealt with a few of these recently, companies that were rural and on ADSL and had moved to 365 and other cloud services. In those cases it was saturation of the uplink, mainly caused by network drives syncing back to their 365 sharepoint instance.

To diagnose those I put a RPi in the networks and ran a script that every x minutes would do an mtr to their ISP's upstream gateway and log it, from this I was able to see if it was the local networks gateway that went awol (indicating an internal network issue) or if the WAN dropped, or more importantly if I saw a dramatic increase in latency then could reasonably assume saturation. Just a thought.

Cyril

cyril7

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#2846931 12-Jan-2022 07:48

Oh, and the other thing to check is the phone wiring and more importantly the filtering status.

Cyril

Paul1977

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#2848050 12-Jan-2022 12:14

@Al12 I can't add any more than @cyril7 in regards to the VDSL as, until you can see the stats and confirm that the correct filters(s) are on the lines(s), it's a guessing game in terms of Internet dropouts.

In regards to the internal network, I agree with those who've said more info is required (and preferably a network diagram as well).

It sounds like you have two routers connected to a single switch? If so, with the right VLAN setup this could work to route different SSIDs/WLANs via different routers (e.g. Management & POS VLANs using router 1, Guest VLAN using router 2). However, based on your apparent level of experience, I'm guessing this isn't what you've done.

If you have two routers plugged into a single switch with no VLANs then this can cause multiple potential problems depending on their configuration. Worst case you might have two routers on the same subnet, with the same address, both acting as DHCP servers.

Creating 3 SSIDs on the same network doesn't separate them, it simply gives access to the same network 3 times (like having 1 room with 3 doors). As others have said, you need VLANs to truly separate them. UniFi guest policies allow you to restrict access to local subnet(s) from certain SSIDs without using VLANs, but I'd always recommend using VLANs in addition to the guest policy to do it properly.

EDIT: Just to add that hiding SSIDs (security by obscurity) isn't really a form of security. Hidden SSIDs are a pain for users, and finding a hidden network is trivial for for anyone interesting in trying to "hack" into it. Strong passwords and minimum WPA2 encryption is what you want.

Rickles

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#2848126 12-Jan-2022 13:10

Just a penneth worth opinion, but with the removal of copper that is speeding up around the country, would not consideration of moving to fibre be a good starting point for a more resolute solution?

cyril7

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#2848198 12-Jan-2022 13:53

Rickles:
Just a penneth worth opinion, but with the removal of copper that is speeding up around the country, would not consideration of moving to fibre be a good starting point for a more resolute solution?

Hi the OP already mentioned that fibre is currently not an option as it's quite rural.

Cyril

Al12

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#2857583 28-Jan-2022 10:20

Hello Everyone

A massive thanks to everyone who contributed here. One of the forum members has reached out to me for assistance. As most of you mentioned it's important to get a Master Filter or the like which would be the first point for a solution. It appears there are no filters whatsoever.

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