For as long as I can remember I’ve had issues with my broadband dropping out but it wasn’t until March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic caused national lock down here in the UK that things really came to a head. I went from just having myself work from home to 4 of us working from home. My wife is on the phone all day, using VoIP and my kids were both being taught at school via Zoom calls, which really brought the issue to a head.
My first thought was it was poor wifi, we had a standard ISP provided router, attached to the wall in one corner of the house providing signal to the rest of the house, so I upgraded that and invested in a new modem/router from the Draytek 2860 range, a much more capable device, but it was still located in the same corner of the house and didn’t improve things.
There was a time when an xbox 360 we had on wifi in one room would seemingly take out the wifi whenever it connected to XBox Live, and the Playstation game Apex Legends would apparently do a similar thing when it connected to EA’s online service but I could never re-create it under controlled circumstances, it wasn’t every time … it just felt like it.
Anyway, back to 2020 and the Draytek didn’t help things like I’d hoped so I started to wonder if there was just too much traffic on the network, I have a whole bunch of what is now called IoT devices but back then it was just more stuff connected to the wifi. I tried to take some of the load off the router/modem by adding a couple of Ubiquiti UAP-AC-Lite and a US-8-60W Gigabit switch to power them.
So now I have what is a pretty high end network setup, better than most small offices I’d dare say, to enable 2 remote workers and 2 remote students (and 2 console gamers) but what I didn’t know at the time that it was the VDSL dropping out rather than a wifi issue, and I don’t remember when or how I came to that realisation, I used to work for an ISP so it was probably one of the tech support team there that looked into it for me, but I don’t remember.
The issue still isn’t solved, and I’m estimating I’ve had it at least since we had it ever since we switched to FTTC, if not before. The cable is “direct in ground”, ie, buried right under the pavement and not in any ducting, so any repairs need the pavement dug up. It’s also the reason why we don’t have fibre … yet. None of the Openreach engineers who have visited have ever found a fault … or rather have never found a fault that is the cause of the dropouts. There have been a couple of config changes they have made and one time they found one of the powerline IP over power devices I had was causing a huge amount of fec errors, but replacing that didn’t stop the dropouts. Eventually I ran some ethernet to the location it was providing.
I’m writing this now because Virgin Broadband currently ARE digging up the path to install fibre, so maybe my woes are coming to and end, either way this post with serve as catharsis for me and my broadband bother.