Intermittent System Outage returns.

Hi Matt,

Thanks so much for your well-organized post, this helps a lot. I've run diagnostics on your site and nothing of concern is jumping out at me so far. Please let me investigate further to see what we may do next.

Your cooperation, patience, and understanding are much appreciated.

Matt,

This surely sounds a lot like what is happening on my system. However, due to the physical layout of my house, the location of the modem, and the location of my computer, I almost never get to see the lights on the modem as the problem occurs. (For one thing, I am 71 years old and I just don't move that fast any more.)

My system is a Gen4 system that is 3 years old. It seemed to work well for most of that time but perhaps around the early part of April, I began to be concerned about apparent occasional outages lasting typically about 4 minutes or so. I detect them about 3 or 4 times per day but they certainly seem to occur at random times.

Like you, I simplified the system by removing my WiFi router and reverting to a direct EtherNet cable directly from the modem to my computer which is a Windows 10 system.

I have become so fed up with this problem that I am right on the verge of throwing in the towel and just junking the whole thing. I have been fighting with tech support over this for days.

Very similar to your case, a service tech was sent to my house who replaced the transmitter/receiver electronics on the dish itself. Because it is an intermittent problem, I was unable to know if this resolved the issue or not but by the very next day, it was clear that the problem was still there. I called on the service tech for some advice. He suspects the modem is faulty but is unable to authorize its replacment himself. He also suggested that I try powering the modem from a different power circuit in the house and checking that all connections were good and secure. With the power off, I disconnected each connector several times to be sure good contact was being made. Then I restored the power.

One other thing that seemed very odd was that the service tech had suggesting termporarily substituting a barrel connector for the grounding block in the RG6 coax between the dish and the modem. It turns out there is no grounding block present. I suspect the original installer did not do this part of his job properly.

Attempts to get tech support to agree to provide a replacement modem always meet with stalling around. They resist replacing it until they find direct evidence themselves that the modem is faulty.

I know that HughesNet has launched a new satellite (EchoStar 19) which their new Gen5 uses. Since my system is a Gen4 system, it is using the aging EchoStar17 satellite. I am beginning to wonder if the outages are being triggered by something to do with the old EchoStar 17 satellite.

I have been satisfied with the speed and data limits imposed by my Gen4 service and have no wish to switch to Gen5. Even with the introductory offers, the cost per month in the long run will be more expensive. I have grown weary of everyone at HughesNet trying to sell me the upgrade to Gen5. I just want my system to work like it always has.

I am not aware of where to see a log of events recorded by the HughesNet modem. My modem is an HT1100 model. I have been told that the gateway I was assigned to is Albuquerque, NM. I have verified that when these outages occur, the weather is not the cause neither at my location nor at the gateway.

I get frustrated with the tech support folks because many of them seem to know very little about the use of Ping commands. If they do know of them, then tend to want to focus on the elapsed time associated with the Ping messages and direct me to think about how far a message must travel from my house up to the satellite, down to the gateway, through the internet to the destination, and the return trip backwards through the same path. I keep having to explain to them that I am not concerned about the elapsed time but rather the fact that more than half of them are being dropped altogether.

That is, if I go to a CMD window and enter a command such as this:

PING /n 1000 8.8.8.8

... a thousand Ping messages will be sent to 8.8.8.8 and each will be expected to return. This test takes a little while but when it is over, I find that typically more than 50% of all the messages get totally lost and never return.

My current method of detecting the beginning of these intermittent outages consists of a program that I wrote that triggers the sending of a Ping message every 5 seconds and waiting to see if a response returns or is dropped. When one of the outages occurs, Ping messages start getting dropped not some of the time but all of the time. When my program detects this, it announces over the computer speakers that I have been disconnected.

Having been shown by tech support how to see state codes for the HT1100, I have recorded the sequence of these codes that occur during the outage. This is a typical sequence of what I see...

0.0.0 Fully operational

0.0.0 Fully operational

0.0.0 Fully operational

0.0.0 Fully operational

23.1.4 TCP acceleration operating in degraded state

21.1.5 Connecting to gateway

(connection error - cannot display the web page)

21.1.4 Discovering a gateway

0.0.0 Fully operational

0.0.0 Fully operational

0.0.0 Fully operational

 Then communication is restored.

NOTE: I am not sure if the connection error occurs before or after the 21.1.4 Discovering a gateway code. (It is hard to hurriedly record these codes using pencil and paper.)

On one occasion, I was able to run to the modem when an outage was underway and see that the System light was out, the Power light was on steady, and the LAN, Transmit and Receive lights were on but blinking a bit. After a few seconds, the System light came back on as the system appeared to recover.

On one occasion, I had kept a CMD window, waiting for an outage to commence. I had a:

PING /n 40 8.8.8.8

.... command standing by ready to be intiated. When an outage began, I started the PING command running. I was a bit surprised to see this resulting sequence:

Request timed out  (26 times)

General Failure  (7 times)

Request timed out  (1 time)

Reply received  (4 times with times of 631, 786, 928, and 611 milliseconds)

Request timed out (1 time)

What do you suppose "General Failure" is? I rather suspect it corresponds to being unable to reach the modem for a state code in my state code list. I bet the Ping program cannot access the modem for a short time there.

So how do you see the event log for the modem?

I am glad that I am not the only person in the world who is fighting this problem!

Hello Matt and ebjoew,

Just a quick heads up on this subject. Our engineers believe they have pinpointed this to one particular gateway and are currently investigating. We will provide you updates as they come through.

Thank you,

Amanda