IP Networking

Hi everyone,

I am experiencing discontinuity of Internet service, this started 1 month ago. Everything worked very well for 1 year of intensive use, but now, I have problems reaching my gateway.
The gateway is not my router but a node belonging to my ISP and I share the same public IP with other clients (NAT is moderated).

Problem : the connection keeps dropping every 4 to 10 minutes. During the cuts, the lights on the router do not change or do not display any failure/error, but every ping, traceroute and nslookup fail outside of my LAN and the connection drops from 50sec to 13min and 16sec, then comes back to normal with normal lattency.

My router is a Huawei HG8245H and its status page shows that the device is working normally even though I have from 6% to 48% of packet loss on extended ping tests to google (in general for 20 minutes tests - 1200 ping requests) on eth0 as well as wlan0.
My latest test was conducted during 24 hours : 85947 packets transmitted, 60065 received, 30% packet loss, time 86091921ms

Router's factory settings :
Open TCP ports are 22(SSH), 23(telnet), 53(domain) and 80(http) plus 2 unusual TCP ports 49152 and 49153 that cannot be closed (bug or additional maintenance ports ?)

The TV box connected to the router is working 100% of the time (even when my Internet connection stops working).
Internet and ipTV belong to different vlans and use different routes. (the TV vlan has a different gateway)
Detail : Sometimes, the sound stops during comercials, I can hear a dialer sound from the TV speakers, then the sound comes back after 5 seconds. The TV box is connected to the router through an Ethernet cable.


I sent all the screenshots and info to my ISP but they closed 3 support tickets (in a row) because they say they can't find any problem ... and they never let me know when they close a support ticket.


Would you be kind enough to give me your opinion about this problem, please ?
- Could it be a Huawei HG8245H router issue ?
- Could it be a damaged fiber issue ?
- Could it be an overloaded ISP node ? (unable to answer/relay the requests of all the clients ?)
- Could it be a bandwidth limit problem on one of my ISP nodes ? (this problem started 1 month ago and, aproximately at the same time, my ISP included Netflix in its triple-play package - coincidence ? - I suppose they had to garantee a minimum bandwidth allocated to each client in the contract, which would reduce the bandwidth limit available for Internet purpose)

The ISP is TotalPlay, in Mexico.

Thank you by advance.
Kind regards

The gateway configuration sounds unusual to me but your ISP is in Mexico so perhaps it's different. Normally, your LAN devices would have the router configured as their gateway (not a node at your ISP). Can you please explain this further.

Also, are you sure that, when your ISP brought new services online (Netflix) that they didn't alter IP addresses?

Does your Huawei HG8245H have standard firmware on it or an ISP provided firmware to lock it down? If you can access it normally then you probably have a 'ping' diagnostic page within its menus which I would use when trouble is experienced to test the internet connection at that time. Are you using IP addresses in ping tests or URL's? If URL's then DNS could be an issue if the ISP has changed that.

Your Huawei HG8245H should show you what gateway and DNS servers your ISP is expecting you to use. Is the Huawei HG8245H configured to pass these through (to LAN) or are these hard-configured on the LAN side (and now different to what the ISP is expecting)?

You ask for opinion. Well I would suspect that the problem is on the ISP side but it's possible that they've changed something which you've not picked up on.

The Huawei HG8245H is the last device on your LAN before the internet so login and run the test(s) from there.

First of all, thank you for your answer.

I confirm that my router is not my gateway, it mainly acts like a DHCP device for my LAN, DMZ management, port-forwarding/triggering.
Here is the main information available on my Huawei router status page in the WAN section :

Internet:
IP address/Subnet Mask : 187.xxx.xxx.126/255.255.255.128
IP acquisition mode : DHCP
VLAN/Priority : 400/0
Gateway : 187.xxx.xxx.1
DNS servers : 200.38.100.210 207.83.200.200

IPTV:
IP address/Subnet Mask : 10.xxx.xxx.231/255.255.224.0
IP acquisition mode : DHCP
VLAN/Priority : 402/5
Gateway : 10.xxx.xxx.1
DNS servers : 10.0.1.130 10.0.1.98

Bridge :
VLAN/Priority : 401/7

My public IP address didn't change when they brought new services online. I don't know if they alter the routes in my Internet VLAN nor in my IPTV VLAN.

The device information page says it is Customized for Totalplay, Mexico, and I have some sections that I cannot change, such as WAN/VLAN configuration, DNS servers, DoS Configuration (only ICMP redirection attack is checked), ALG configuration, and IGMP configuration.
I have access to a Maintenance page that allows me to make ping and traceroute tests. I tested using domain name google.com and gateway IP address. When Internet connection drops, both domain names and IP tests fail, and the router LEDs stay normal as if the link was still established.

By default, the router passes the DNS and gateway configuration throught DHCP. I keep having this discontinuity of service even when I specify static DNS such as 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 on all the computers of the LAN.

Thank you very much for your help and opinion. I think that my ISP is hiding something. I am going to contact them again and let you know the outcome. Thanks again.

Well in my opinion that's pretty conclusive.

The router gets its config (ip address, gateway address, DNS servers) from the ISP so if you restart the router (so it picks up any changes the ISP has made to its network) and then ping test 8.8.8.8 (which is Google's DNS server which should be always up) from the diagnostic page, then failure indicates your internet connection is stuffed and rules out any local LAN misconfiguration.

I'd be passing that evidence to the ISP.