Ok, so it's finally to the point where it's driving me nuts. The connection appears to completely drop any time I go to a new or not recently visited site.

E.g.
Streaming a game just fine on espn3
Browsing tww and everything is fine
I go to ebay, I haven't been browsing it, just going there
The ebay page starts to load but the connection drops completely out
The connection is dead for a few seconds then everything is back to normal

That's pretty much the behavior. Any site not frequented makes the connection drop. Also youtube always hangs after playing the first second of a video... there's a loooooong delay of nothing, then it's normal again. I've also noticed a 3-4% packet loss when the network is active. Also this is across all computers on the network, not just one PC.

I've unplugged the router and everything multiple times. I'm about to the point where I'm going to call our ISP but the last time I called them they "checked" from their end... everything is fine. No internet for 3 days. Turns out the entire region was down affecting many customers but they never told me anything other than they checked it from their end and it was fine. I suspect I'll get the same treatment this go round.

Anyway, does my description above of what's going on sound like a problem anyone is familiar with?

[Edited on January 1, 2013 at 11:08 PM. Reason : -]

[Edited on January 1, 2013 at 11:08 PM. Reason : -]

1/1/2013 11:07:08 PM

What is the DNS Server address set as on your computer? Does it point to your router/gateway address? If so, try setting it to one of the big public DNS Servers like Google's (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4).

You could also install wireshark and take a packet capture to get info on what the last request sent is and possibly see who is responsible.

1/2/2013 12:39:03 AM

what happens when you plug directly into the modem?

1/2/2013 3:31:44 AM

Thanks, I'll try these suggestions when I get back to it.

Pinging the router and the modem was rock solid. I didn't see problems in the ping test until I hit the default gateway.

1/2/2013 9:30:43 AM

the default gateway should be your router..

1/2/2013 9:47:12 AM

Guess I could have clarified a bit. I get the packet loss when pinging the default gateway that's set on the modem. Reaching the router and modem are fine, it's just when I take the first hop out of the modem.

1/2/2013 1:41:33 PM

When you say you unplugged the router and everything, does that mean you tried resetting it to Factory Defaults?

1/2/2013 1:46:35 PM

^^

what's the packet loss look like when you're pinging the modem's default gateway? I wouldn't read too much into it for two reasons

1) many routers are configured to rate-limit ICMP as an anti-DoS measure.
2) Ping is designed to test reachability, not packet-loss, performance, response time, etc.

a better test, as smoothcrim suggested is plugging your machine directly into the modem and trying to reproduce the problem you're describing. if you still see it, then it's definitely a network problem... i would then look at a wireshark trace, but that might not be something you'd know what to do with (not knowing what kind of technical background you might have)

1/2/2013 3:17:13 PM

Wrong thread

[Edited on January 4, 2013 at 7:26 PM. Reason : Dur]

1/4/2013 7:19:37 PM