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Prime time every evening bandwidth drops to a fraction - throttling? Next troubleshoot steps?

mikey9980

Our FIOS speed drops considerably, intermittently but for tens of minutes at a time. The slowdowns seems to cluster during evening hours the most, but also during work hours. I run ping to router at the same time I run ping to DNS and other websites. During the slowdowns my ping times to router (via wifi) remain good, 2-6ms. But ping times to common websites (e.g. cnn.com, weather.com, verizon.net, ...) will go to 1000-2000ms (from a normal of 15-25ms). I admin into the router and use ping in advanced tools there and get the same slow speed. Very few dropped packets though, perhaps that's a clue.

The verizon online speed test, that supposedly tests your router will always go to 49% and then error with a timeout after a long while. It has never once worked. The other speed tests on the web typically report 60-90Mbs when I have good service, but during the slowdowns those tests show it as low as a fraction of 1 (e.g. 0.3Mbs), so we are talking dialup speed. Streaming services in our house begin having trouble at these times too.

I made a support call and they said they saw "moca errors" and sent me a new router, despite that the router I have is near identical, new, and generally these things have no moving parts so it is hard to believe it is that. I'm going to try plugging my existing router into another coax outlet to make sure it isn't that and then I guess I have to go through the CHORE of replacing the router and possibly having to update every device (ring devices, netflix, computers, etc... going to try to configure the router with same network name and password). The thing is, I'm a techy and I know this router change, that is going to take me a chunk of time, is not likely to fix the problem. I think they just reached the end of their checklist.

Is there any way I can trouble shoot this further myself? I notice tracerts are not that useful anymore and just show one hop. I see there are some stickies on MOCA, so I am going to take a look at that. My guess on this is that Verizon is over-subscribed in my neighborhood and at times of contention our services is either intentionally throttled our service or we just hit contention.

Accepted answers

Cang_Household

MoCA errors is just MoCA errors, this mean your WAN MoCA is interfered by something, either by those cable subscribers or worse, somebody is trying to steal your internet.

Make sure you clean up your coax network by removing all unnecessary coax connections and make sure no coax connections run to the streets and shared with other cable subscribers. Cable standards do interfere with MoCA.

All comments

gs0b

Are you on a 100Mbps or slower speed tier with a MoCA WAN connection? If so, make sure all your coax connectors are tight and your splitters are in good condition. For best results, unused splitter ports should be terminated, or better yet, eliminated by using a smaller splitter.

If you can run an Ethernet cable from the ONT to the router, do that. Once you do that, contact Verizon support and have them change your ONT from MoCA WAN to Ethernet WAN. It only takes a few minutes and doesn't cost anything. Ethernet is better, and you'll be setup for easy upgrades to faster speeds.

Verizon doesn't oversubscribe the way cable companies do. It's unlikely that you're seeing a congestion problem, but it could happen. If you are on an old 100Mbps or slower speed tier, you're on an old BPON ONT and OLT, too. Those may be getting more crowded as Verizon transitions everyone to GPON. If you can get Ethernet WAN installed, that paves the way to an easy GPON upgrade. You may even find that upgrading to the slowest GPON package (300/300) costs less than your current plan.

mikey9980

Thank you for the info!!!

Most definitely. There is a lot of loose coax, like feeds I see on the outside of the house that are no longer in use. I have terminators from an old RG6 toolkit so I'll see if I can tidy up and get rid of unused cable runs and splitters. I also have two extenders, the real kind that work off coax (actiontec/quantum also?), one of which I added recently. Perhaps this exacerbated the problem creating more traffic on coax?

I had problems over a year ago and they installed a new ONT so my guess is I have a ethernet port on there and can move my router there. I'll take a look at this, thank you!!! Although I wonder if that means my two extenders that use the coax would no longer work?

I haven't checked these services recently and don't know what BPON/GPON mean, so I'll take a look at the current offerings. Since I use for business too, I'd definitely upgrade if it means I can get more reliable equipment and internet experience.

Appreciate the pointers!!

Cang_Household

MoCA errors is just MoCA errors, this mean your WAN MoCA is interfered by something, either by those cable subscribers or worse, somebody is trying to steal your internet.

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