Forum Discussion
Slow or dropping connection
Hello.. For the last couple of days, we've been seeing seriously degraded performance from our Hughesnet connection. Last night, I had a yellow light on the diagnostics page due to a 30.1.1 state err...
Good morning MrCRJP,
It's been a while since we last heard from you, so we will close this thread. I also just ran diagnostics on your site and everything looks fine. If you still have concerns, please start a new thread and include a detailed explanation so we can better assist you.
Well, again, thank you for your help. It's working at this point, but sometimes still very slow loading elements. This isn't just the latency overhead, since we're accustomed to that.
What can we do on our end, other than power cycling the modem and of course keeping snow off the dish? Are any of the steps you took repeatable by the end user?
I do like the service when it's working properly. The latency isn't a big hassle, and the speeds are good. I'd just like the experience to be consistent.
As of this morning, we're dead in the water again. I powered down the modem while eating breakfast, since we couldn't get anywhere with the connection. Powered back up, still no good. I connected a laptop via Ethernet, also no good. Went into system control center on the laptop, we see all green on there. Ran the connectivity test, 60-90% packet loss.
Is it possible that we have developed a line of sight problem? The dish is on the north side of our house, free standing on a pole about 40-50 feet from the house, pointed over the roof. We have a single story ranch style house. The dish worked fine all last winter pointed in this way, regardless of snow pack on the roof. We even took down many trees just south of the house over the summer.
What might cause this situation where the hardware and firmware looks fine, but we're suddenly seeing significant packet loss?
Is it possible that we have developed a line of sight problem? The dish is on the north side of our house, free standing on a pole about 40-50 feet from the house, pointed over the roof. We have a single story ranch style house. The dish worked fine all last winter pointed in this way, regardless of snow pack on the roof. We even took down many trees just south of the house over the summer.
What might cause this situation where the hardware and firmware looks fine, but we're suddenly seeing significant packet loss?
I called the support number on Thursday, and they gave me case ID 116869955. The last thing the first level tech did was to get the advanced tech to change my gateway. It's now J2OMA013HNSIGW0101, to answer your question. They said that this should hopefully fix the problem within 24 hours; That does appear to be the case. It was a little bit discouraging at first, though, because we still saw tons of packet loss and very slow speeds yesterday morning, but by yesterday evening, the connection was quite solid.
All of this testing and troubleshooting burned through the last of our data for the month, unfortunately, but even in the degraded state during normal hours, we're seeing much faster speeds now.
Thanks to everyone who has read and replied on this thread!
Well, not sure what it used to be, but your gateway is in Omaha, Nebraska now. You may want to check the weather there when you have a connection problem, just to be sure.
That said, that's just the first thing to check if something's intermittent. The other things that can affect it are:
1. Dish alignment - in case it's been hit hard by something like a lawn mower or falling tree limb, or if the mount has otherwise been somehow dislodged.2. Blockage and/or reflections - Blowing tree limbs and foliage can cause havoc if anywhere within 45 degrees of the dish's view. The signal can be reflected back into the dish causing nasty standing wave patterns, increasing the overall error rate (and reducing the signal quality number you see).
3. Unsecure cable connections/leaky cables - Cables should be finger tight at the back of the modem as well as at the dish. The cabling itself should be water-resistant, so the outer covering should be clear of any nicks or breaks. Might want to inspect all connections and cabling to make sure there are no problems.
4. Power supply - The modem should be plugged directly into the wall and not go through a filtered power strip or other uninteruptable power source. Power variations and low voltage situations can disrupt the way the modem regulates power to the transmitter through the cabling to the dish.
MarkJFine wrote:Well, not sure what it used to be, but your gateway is in Omaha, Nebraska now.
If they actually did change his gateway, it must mean he's in one of those fringe areas with overlapping beams in which they could remotely swap his service to the alternate beam. If that's the case, I wonder if being in that fringe area could have made his service more susceptible to signal issues with the previously used beam.
