I wanted to see if anyone has ever experienced something like this or knows what it might be:
For the last 4 days, right around 6PM, my cable connection goes to hell. I get a variety of conditions, from "no WAN device detected" messages from the router, to intermittent connectivity. When I am connected, it takes for instance, a couple of minutes to load APS, then I might either get a page here quickly, or it may take a couple of minutes, or I might get nothing at all.
When I ping something, I get intermittent connections, with interspersed timeouts. Speed is about 50ms to outside sites like google, which I think is normal for me. Going to someplace like Speedtest, I can't get through an entire download check, but it sometimes goes partway through and shows me speed bursts up to maybe 3mbps (normal is about 18-20 for me) and upload tests fail completely. Trying to do something bandwidth intensive like streaming Netflix is total fail.
The totally weird thing is the time issue. As I said, starts around 6PM then goes at least until 11PM which is the latest I usually go to bed. The next morning, like right now, everything is back to normal. In fact the symptoms are almost like the kind of issues I ran into when my last cable modem was going out, except the whole time thing seems to make that a very remote possibility.
Besides the above stuff, I ensured a schedule wasn't accidentally put on the router (plus it's multi-source and works fine with my 3G card plugged in, which is how I've been accessing the net the last few evenings) and plugged two different computers directly into the modem. Everything of course from the modem on was turned off and on (the modem for up to an hour to ensure it wasn't an overheating issue), and all connections were checked. I also plugged the modem into the mainline side of the splitter (that goes to TV and Internet) to make sure the splitter wasn't bad. And the regular cable connection to the TV works fine after 6PM. So I'm at a loss. Could there be any way a neighbor (I live in a condo) could have physically gotten into my connection via the coax and be doing some weird, bandwidth sucking business that starts at 6PM every day?
I have the cable company coming out this evening around 6PM to see if they can trace what's up (just watch - it'll work fine today) but am trying to make sure I have checked everything possible that could be on my end.
On a tangent, I haven't called my cable company for tech support in probably 8 years. Their tier 1 now officially sucks. There is no more live help number given. My first try was with a "live" person via online chat. I think they hire retards for that. The guy of course first told me that it was my personal equipment (knowing how tier 1 works, I had already given him info on all checks I did in my first post to him). Then he told me it was the wireless signal from my router (even though I never told him whether I had a wired or wireless router) interfering with my cable connection. Then he kept telling me the problem would be solved if I just plugged my computer directly into the modem. He did that several times even though I said that had already failed. I finally had to give up on him, and I found a number to call that put me in touch with a "robot technician". The freakin' AI was more intelligent than the guy on the live chat. At least it asked me to do reasonable stuff and actually reported back to me what it was seeing on my connection. It then was smart enough, after seeing the weird problem (in fact I think it even said something like, "this is weird"), to send me to a real live person, who I assume was at least tier 2, since he asked me to do reasonable checks like ipconfig and ping. Of course it was 45 minutes before I got to him. Argh.
