modem and ISP issue

[freaknut]

I have an issue where my internet connection will randomly slow down and maintain a ping of about 700 for anywhere from a half an hour to 4 hours. When I reset my modem, it will fix the issue for about 5 minutes, at which point it will begin to slow down again. When the issue does begin to go away, my ping slowly drops down to normal again over the course of about 10 minutes. I have also once had my connection go out completely, but reseting the modem fixed that issue without any further problems.

My ISP is SBC Global, and I have a DSL connection. Could there possibly be a problem with the modem itself? It is a few years old I think, and I wonder if it might just be dying on me slowly. Secondly, could there possibly be a problem with my modem interfacing with SBC's router that would require me to either replace my modem or require SBC to fix something? The last option (it's SBC's fault!) has been explored already, and SBC has claimed that when they check it there are no connectivity issues.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. If you want more info, I'll try to answer your questions as best I can. Thanks!

 

[sostechs]

I had my cable modem go out in a similar way...of course it took 2 hours on the phone to convince the guy it wasn't MS Office creating the problem (that was actually true)
It would only stay working if I put it right in front of the air conditioner to keep it cool.


Best thing would be try another computer with that connection, but if that isn't available, the next thing comes to mind would be a lot of connections. Try NETSTAT command in command prompt when you get the slowdown and make sure there isn't a ton of connections hitting your computer (from spyware, viruses). This happened at an office computer I was to fix. There were so many connections, it couldnt get anywhere.

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[freaknut]

The connection has been tried with several different computers. This is actually a small office network, and we do server hosting, so there are times when we've got 5-10 clients connected to our server as well.

 

[Ethereal_Dragon]

Do you have network monitoring software to make sure that your connection isn't fully being utilized during the high ping times? Ping traffic is ICMP packets, and they have the lowest priority out of all the other traffic, and if the circuit is 100% utilized, then the pings will be very slow like that.

 

[freaknut]

I've been looking for some good network monitoring software that is free, but I don't have any yet. I have gone to dslreports.com and done their connection test...I don't know how that test works, but it always says our download speed is terrible when we have the connection issues.

 

[Ethereal_Dragon]

When you said that SBC (now AT&T) has reported no conectivity issues, do you know if they were looking at the PHYSICAL line testing, or did they look at the Logical layer to see if there was any congestion on the line? If the issue persists, call up the DSL department, and ask them to look at the amount of traffic on the link. I am thinking that chances are good that it will be alot of traffic causing this issue.