Monitoring internet quality

[redneck joe]

been trying to stream last few days and getting lots of sound dropping, freezing, stopping etc. My internet has never been great but after I called their main office and complained well enough they sent three trucks to our area. At least my VPN stays working. I work from home and constantly dropping internet and VPN was not conducive to a good work experience.

so prior to calling them back i want to know what my performance is; how many times it actually drops, etc. Otherwise they will just tell me like they did for years that all is fine.


Make the assumption that I'm an idiot.....how do I do this?

 

[alldodge]

Have you run speed test?
http://www.speedtest.net/

 

[JASinIL2006]

I don't think Speedtest will keep track of dropped connections, etc. (I've heard some network guys suggest that Speedtest may not be that useful because it's easy to provide optimized connections for Speedtest, inflating the apparent speed of one's service.)

Joe, you're looking for a constant monitoring program, correct, something that will allow you to monitor your connection over some period of time, rather than take a snapshot. Is that right?

 

[JASinIL2006]

This is a pretty interesting discussion that addresses this topic: https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/internet-quality-monitoring-tool.203438/

 

[redneck joe]

I don't think Speedtest will keep track of dropped connections, etc. (I've heard some network guys suggest that Speedtest may not be that useful because it's easy to provide optimized connections for Speedtest, inflating the apparent speed of one's service.)

Joe, you're looking for a constant monitoring program, correct, something that will allow you to monitor your connection over some period of time, rather than take a snapshot. Is that right?

yessir. Our probs are intermittent.

 

[southkogs]

Joe - I'm not sure if you're getting Comcast by you or one of the other carriers. But I was having some goofy trouble with Comcast with both occasional outages, and intermittent speed drops. Went a few circles with them until we did two things simultaneously: bought a new modem, and they ran a new line.

What was funny about it was they came in and told me my modem couldn't handle my pipeline. When I countered that it had been doing fine for over a year since we went with the higher speed connection, they didn't back off. BUT ... they also said they were going to run a new cable to the box and upgrade a couple things in there.

They can be like arm wrestling an octopus sometimes.

 

[Scott Danforth]

i hear you about wresting the octopus

the only way I was able to get Comcast to change the line was when lightning hit the pole and followed it to my house. they had to run about 3 miles of line, including the line to the house. Then again, so did the local phone company and electric
utility company

 

[fishrdan]

Install and run Pingplotter to multiple locations: your router's LAN IP, router's WAN gateway, the ISP's DNS server, yahoo, google, etc. Set the ping to every 10-15 seconds. The results will show you where the communication is dropping out, lost packets, and nice graphic showing problems. Leave it running to capture the issues. Screen shots are handy for battling with the ISP.

Hopefully the issue is resolved within 30 days, that's the trial period for pingplotter.

 

[dingbat]

I cut the cord and went to streaming services. Supposedly had 50/50 service and still had issues with the stock Fios modem/router.
caaled Fios and had them switch me from cable to Ethernet. Dumped the Fios box and bought the Netgear Nighthawk router.

The increase in speed and reliability was noticeable. Since bumped up to100/100 and bury speedtest on my Iphone.

The Nighthawk supports Netgear Genie app as well. PAll the network monitoring and logging you need