datlas 

I believe my "problem" is really with Verizon, but I am hoping someone here is tech-savvy enough to give me some advice or insight. I will be as brief as I can...thanks for reading.

We have Verizon FIOS high speed internet. We actually changed our service about 1 year ago to get rid of our phone and TV service and only have internet. At the time of the service change, our router was also "updated," although I am 99% sure the problem is NOT the router. Since we changed our service, there is a new problem. The internet access is frozen/disconnected periodically. Like every 10-15 minutes. Only for about 3-5 seconds. It feels like it disconnects from the internet, although I don't know if it is really disconnecting or just freezing.

This became apparent when I use my computer for work. I have to connect to my work computer through a secured network. Whenever the signal freezes/drops, I get kicked off the secured network and have to sign in again. If using typical internet browsers or streaming video or wifi devices, the issue is minor and not a real problem other than a brief pause if streaming video.

I have been on the phone with Verizon several times about this. First they said it was the router, and a hard reset would solve the problem. It did not. They asked if the color of the lights on the router changed when the signal froze. It did not. Then they said it was probably a wifi issue due to some other factor in my house. It is not, the problem occurs on the desktop that is hard-wired and does not use WiFi. Verizon said they checked the signal to our house and it's "perfect."

I got frustrated that they could not help me so I talked to a Verizon Technician. He said he did numerous traces/tests on our signal and it's not a problem. He could not tell me what the problem is, but insists it's inside our house. I still don't buy it.

Here comes the cycling part. I just started using Zwift. When the signal freezes, my output on Zwift instantly goes to zero. It lasts 3-5 seconds, which is just enough to get dropped when on a group ride. Since this happens every 10 minutes, it's very frustrating to get dropped. It's like having my chain drop frequently and no one soft-pedals for me!

I imagine I may have to live with this, but if anyone is experienced with FIOS I would be interested in some input. I suppose I may have to get a technician to our house, but Verizon said that since (according to them) the problem is inside our house we will have to pay for them to come and try to fix it.

TL;DR...our FIOS internet freezes frequently, and when the signal gets dropped, I get dropped from the group ride on Zwift.

texbiker

If I understand you are using the FIOS modem as your router. I would suggest you change to a separate router like an Asus RT-AC68R to see if that makes a difference. I base this on the FIOS saying the signal is good into your house but hesitates on your pc's. The carrier supplied equipment is not the best. They can be defective and/or low specifications. If possible see if FIOS allows you to supply your own modem and router.
This link is how another FIOS customer modified his setup.
https://www.loganmarchione.com/2015/...-verizon-fios/

Bmach

I had a problem similar to that years ago and they could not find it. I replaced the NIC (network interface card) that they installed and the problem was gone.

unterhausen

a disconnect does sound local to me, and I would replace their wifi device. I assume you're using wifi to connect. I have one computer that disconnects from my wifi fairly regularly due to a bad signal path. Fortunately for me, it doesn't really affect anything, but I imagine it would cause problems if I was VPN'ing into work.

My reasoning is that TCP/IP doesn't really disconnect that fast, but wifi does.

noglider 

You can't use another router with FIOS; you need their router. This makes troubleshooting a little hard.

You need a utility that sends a ping every second and shows when pings get dropped. Dropped pings don't affect lots of web browsing, but this problem of yours can wreak havoc on VPN connections such as the one you have to work. Perhaps Zwift uses a VPN, too. In any case, I say keep the heat on Verizon, and ask them how they test and find there is no problem. There is indeed a problem.

Do connect a computer to the router over a cable, though. If the problem is not there, then you know it's in the wireless. This is good. You can connect a second router to the verizon router solely for the wifi. The best way to do this is:

- disable the DHCP server function of the new router
- disable the wireless function of the verizon router
- connect a LAN port of one router to a LAN port of the other router
- set up the wireless feature of the new router

Shimagnolo

I've worked in networking depts of large corporations.
This sounds like the classic stateful device / keep-alive issue.

Devices such as firewalls (or even just a router doing NAT) maintain state tables of active connections. The size of these state tables is limited by the RAM in the device. The device *must* discard connections that are no longer in use in order to keep from running out of memory. Now if the client and server bring the connection down gracefully, the network device will see packets with the FIN bit set, and will know the connection has been terminated, and will remove it from the state table. But what if one party of the connection was powered off, or what if the connections were in fact malicious traffic? Bringing down network devices by filling up their state tables with bogus connection initiations is an old tactic.

So the solution implemented in stateful devices is to have a timeout period. Every time a packet is seen on a connection, the timeout counter is reset. But if the timeout period expires without a packet being seen, the connection is purged from the state table. Once again, a stateful device *must* purge out old connections, or run the risk of either crashing from running out of memory, or blocking new connections because of a full state table.

The solution is enabling "keepalives": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keepalive

We used to have fits with the application developers in the corporations who thought they should be able to open a connection through a firewall, then let it sit unused for two hours, then expect to resume using it.

So the stateful device is most probably:
a) Your own home router
b) Your employers VPN server to which you are connecting.
c) Your employers firewall which you are passing through to reach their VPN server.

Whether "c" exists depends on their network topology. Some people put the VPN server directly on the Internet, others hide it behind a firewall, and in some cases the firewall and the VPN server may be the same device. (I set one up this way at one corporation.)

Shimagnolo

Almost forgot; There is another way to improvise a keepalive on a VPN tunnel:
Just keep a ping going on a host that is accessed via the VPN tunnel.
e.g.
1. Open a terminal window.
2. Start a ping to a host internal to the other end of the VPN connection, with a long interval, e.g. one minute.

Then just leave that window open with the ping running as long as the VPN is in use.
Any stateful device in the path of the VPN will reset the timeout every minute when it sees the ping.

unterhausen

that's an interesting point. Sounds like maybe his router is booting the connection, since he has the problem with zwift. Or maybe it's Verizon and there is no hope.

I had a program that sent experiment data over tcp/ip. It had to check for dropped connections because it would accept multiple clients and they would sometimes drop. Took a while to figure that one out, Microsoft's network stack wasn't graceful about trying to send data to a dead connection.

datlas 

Thanks for the comments above.

I am fairly sure it's NOT the WiFi. My desktop computer (the one for work) is connected directly to the router, and it drops the internet signal periodically. This bypasses the WiFi. It still COULD be the router but not the WiFi.

I explained this all at length to Verizon and they still say from their tests the signal to my house is fine. If I have a few hours to kill I can try calling Verizon again, but they have so many layers of CSR's that it takes forever to talk to a technician, and as in the OP when I did talk to a technician he insists the signal quality is perfect.

noglider 

Find out what tests they are running that determine the signal is good. It's possible they don't test continuity of TCP connections.

ericy

For what it is worth, we have FIOS at home, and I have no such issues with either VPN or with Zwift.

The intermittent and short duration of the outages could make this a pain to troubleshoot. I can toss out some random ideas.

The ongoing ping sounds like a good idea. For example, you could ping the router itself just to verify that the problem isn't in your PC, and if that doesn't show the problem then try pinging the IP address of the next hop (use tracert to identify what all of the hops are).

Do you have another PC/laptop that you can connect and try?

What is your computer anyways? Mac? Windows? What OS version? Many systems keep track of a count of the number of errors, but they sometimes make it hard to find. If you see the error count going up somewhere, it could help you narrow it down a bit.

I doubt that Zwift uses a VPN, but it probably uses secure sockets for communications.