It's embarrassing for me to ask, since I used to be really good at this stuff, but man, I have forgotten everything.
Issue: My fixed wireless, which has been pretty rock solid for five years straight is currently, for the past couple of weeks, going all glitchy on me. It has always pretty steadily provided me with 12-18mbps with low latency. Currently, it's jumping all over the place from 0.5mbps to 18mbps with crazy latencies into the hundreds. It has been hell on streaming, and also irritating to just browse with the latency delays.
Troubleshooting: I've been running speedtest to document the crazy jumps. I have of course turned everything from the POE to the router (Orbi mesh with two satellites - I've restarted all three) to the computer off and back on again. I've plugged a computer directly into the POE, bypassing the router, and have gotten the same results. I've also logged into my Verizon hotspot and that has worked fine. So it really seems like this is on the other side of the POE connector.
ISP: I called the ISP last week, and of course the first tier guy just read from his manual, told me to do what I already did, then said that everything was fine on their end and that it's me. I had interestingly gotten a late evening voicemail from a higher tier guy who had seen the ticket and who said he had made some changes on their end and that I should see what happens and call them back if nothing changes. So of course nothing has changed and I'm calling them back tomorrow.
Reason for this post: Can any of you network guys think of anything that I missed checking on my end? I might have blamed my router if it wasn't also doing the same thing directly at the POE. I just want to doublecheck before I talk to them again that I didn't miss anything so I can be more forceful about having them look at things on their end or sending someone out to inspect their POE and the antenna.
I'm suspecting that it might be an issue between me and the tower they're pointing me to. Either it has suddenly gotten a lot more traffic, or else maybe some new structures went up between me and the antenna that could be causing the mbps variations.
I've been pretty happy with their service up until now, even at the 15ish average mbps, which has been adequate for HD streaming and stuff. If they can't resolve this though, I think it will be time to give Elon a call. I'm in an area that was iffy for solid Starlink, but I had a buddy pass through a couple of months ago. He's doing the van life thing for a while and has one of the portable Starlink setups. He set it up on my front lawn while he was here so I could test it out, and I got a reliable 100-300mbps the entire time he was here. So I guess all the new sats are providing solid coverage here now.