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Forum Discussion
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...
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.
- I have also determined over the last few months that this router does cause packet loss. After replacing the router with other brands and working very closely with COX on an FCC complaint this router causes 2-10% until reset. Once reset it will resolve for a few hours then start dropping packets.