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Intermittent bad packet loss with RAX80
Got the RAX80 last October and suffered through strange random sluggish internet problems for months - e.g. web sites would initially fail to load but then load on the 2nd or 3rd try, randomly. Fina...
I am watching for someone to give you an answer because I have what seems like perhaps the same problem.
Beginning August 10th, I started having horrible internet performance (ethernet, not WiFi), off and on, with my brand new Nighthawk router that had been working beautifully since I installed it on May 3. Notice that it stopped working exactly 1 week after my phone support expired. My internet service provider (Optimum) had problems in my neighborhood that day, so at first I thought the problem was theirs. When Optimum's problem was fixed, mine was not. As soon as I returned to my old router, the problem vanished and I cancelled my Optimum service appointment.
I have since returned to the new router, and back to the old again, a few times, and every single time, the old router works well and the Nighthawk does not. I have a relatively reliable internet connection with the Nighthawk, but it's just that the packet loss is so common that I just cannot work productively. (I'm connected to my company's corporate network in Raleigh and have been working from home since April of 2019.) If I can't work productively with the Nighthawk, then I cannot use it. It was way too expensive to just stick on the shelf to use as a backup in case my main router dies. Which was what I did with the other router I bought in April that didn't really satisfy me, and thank goodness I did keep it for that purpose because I sure need it now!
I made a backup of the Nighthawk's settings, and did a factory reset. That didn't help so I restored the backup. I upgraded the Nighthawk's firmware, and that didn't help. I turned on QoS, that didn't help. Many times I have rebooted the cablemodem and router, that sometimes helps but only for a while. Most times it doesn't help at all. The old router works all the time and it was like one third the price. (On the other hand, the Nighthawk worked all the time, too, for the first 3 months + 1 week.)
My packet loss ranges from 10% to 60%, rarely 80% or 100% with "Ping request could not find host www.yahoo.com. Please check the name and try again" in between responses having only 10% packet loss. And there are spells with 0% packet loss too. With the old router, I sometimes experience 10% or 20% packet loss but without any of the loss in productivity, my Remote Desktop session communicates with Raleigh at perfectly acceptable speed.
That's really interesting - after hours of googling, I thought I might be the only one to ever experience this problem with the RAX line. When using the pinging app on my phone, I too find that it often aborts completely due to timing out. I find even packet loss around 10% to have significant consequences, e.g. pages sporadically not loading, apps like internet radio thinking I'm offline, but since the internet appears to remain connected overall and speed test apps still work, I was at a loss (couldn't resist pun) as to the problem for a very long time. I'd bet that many other RAX owners do have this problem but lack the technical knowledge to get even as far as us in troubleshooting. Hope someone has some advice.
Hey guess what! I found out that Optimum Online internet service has been giving these symptoms to dozens of people in the Stamford area even though they tell us that the problems (from tropical storm Isaias) have all been fixed. (Maybe hundreds or thousands, but most people just haven't figured out yet that the problem is not their own equipment.) So with that enlightenment, I tried the experiment a bunch more times, and started finding that indeed my old router has the problem too, not only the RAX80.
Like you said, each time you change a setting, there's a likelihood that it appears to fix the problem, but that's not due to the setting you changed, it's due to rebooting the router. A freshly rebooted router suffers less from the bad Optimum service, than a router that has not been rebooted recently. It was only coincidence, that it seemed to look like the other router didn't have the problem and the RAX80 did.
I apologize for blaming you, RAX80.
Interesting. I will be sure to thoroughly test plugging directly into the cable modem if/when it happens again, but I'm pretty sure that immediately fixed it before (without rebooting the modem), pointing to the router as the problem - for me anyway.
You're totally right, when I plug the PC directly into the cablemodem the problem goes away without rebooting anything. I am told that would make sense because the traffic behind a router has more information packed into each packet, or some such thing, so it's more complicated, and the bad network is not sufficient to handle it. Whereas when you remove the router from the transaction it simplifies things so that the bad network is good enough to mask the problem, especially since plugging directly into the cablemodem means your whole home network is reduced to ONLY ONE DEVICE. Both yesterday and today, around 11AM performance got so bad I had to plug my computer into the cablemodem in order to get any work done, and had to suffer without Alexa and all the other goodies that would normally be on my home network. After 6PM I turned the router back on and it's been usable all evening with only one exception lasting about a minute. I'm pretty convinced now, that my problem is Optimum and not the router. Good luck to you.