Over the last year, I’ve lived in three different places, hundreds of miles apart from each other. My internet has been cursed at all three, with frequent disconnects for a few minutes at a time, several times a week. The curse seems to follow me around. In that time I’ve switched out ISPs, modems, routers, and all of my connected devices except for my phone. Roommates at all three addresses reported not having had issues with the Internet prior to my arrival.
The symptoms are pretty much the same wherever I go. The modem loses its WAN connection to the ISP for a few minutes, comes back online for a few hours to a few days, and then goes out again. This has been increasing in frequency, and at my latest apartment it’s happening about 10-15x a day and really disturbing my work. Two ISP technicians have not found anything wrong with the lines. One suggested replacing the exterior cable just for the heck of it, but the signal was strong and steady as is. At the other locations, different ISP technicians have come and examined all the equipment and cabling and none have found anything out of the ordinary. They’ve replaced cables and routers and modems to no success.
The only commonality I can see between the places are me and my one phone; everything else has been switched out and tested in various combinations.
Now, here’s the “paranoid” part: A few months ago I was interrogated/interviewed by the Secret Service for some (many) anti-Trump posts I made online. Could these problems be related to some shitty wiretap that they’re doing? I don’t really particularly care if they’re listening, but I do need to be able to go and stay online for work and school =/ I just wonder if there have been any public reports of similar situations.
The only other thing I can think of is that there’s something wrong with my phone (Google Pixel 2 running the latest Android), but I can’t imagine what it could do that would cause the modem to disconnect from the ISP repeatedly. It also doesn’t do that to public wifis it connects to (cafes, libraries, etc.). It’s only my home internet that suffers from this problem, and I’m at my wit’s end… what could it be? I swear I’m only a little crazy.
Not likely. There is no particular need to tap your physical line at the house. Much easier to tap fiber connections upstream than coax, and chances are there’s already a tap installed upstream somewhere for various purposes–not necessarily all law enforcement related, but it’s pretty trivial to pick out traffic and forward it to the right people if they really wanted it.
Your cell phone should have no reason to cause a physical ISP link drop either.
Make a WiFi Cantenna (Steel soup can, wire, connectors etc…) and use a wi-fi scanner (WifiInfoView). Google it, its really cheap and easy to do and use to it to connect to a nearby public WIFI spot. See if it makes a difference.
This sounds like every internet connection I’ve ever been on. If you log into your modem, there’s usually a log of warnings and errors and pretty much every time I logon, there’s always dozens of entries in the last week.
Most people don’t notice because they don’t use the internet intensively. If something doesn’t load for a while, they don’t chalk it up to the modem disconnecting.
Also, torrenting is frequently hard on cheap modems/routers and causes them to flake out since they weren’t designed to handle the large number of simultaneous connections. If you need to restart your modem to fix the issue, it’s probably a problem with a cheap modem.
You know the most insane thing? Literally since the day I posted this, the connection issues have completely stopped. For the last two weeks before this post, it was happening 10-15x a day consistently. I did not do anything differently. Now it’s been a solid couple days with zero drops.
I wasn’t torrenting or even Netflixing or anything of the sort. Just browsing the web, typically. If it starts happening again, I’ll definitely try turning off the phone for a day, but now it seems completely fine. Do you believe in absurd coincidences? I might have to start tracking the outages minute-by-minute to look for patterns.
I can imagine some poor intern at their office. “Oh, he’s browsing the SDMB again. DISCONNECT! Haha. Oh, he’s watching porn. No, wait a minute more. DISCONNECT! He’s taking a quiz? Wait, wait, wait for the timer… DISCONNECT!”
