Hi,
We've been having a problem where one or two of our devices (phones, laptops, iPads, Apple TV) lose internet connection for 10-30 sec at a time, while the others are fine.
As best as I can tell it's a full loss of connection, not just something running very slowly due to us pushing the bandwidth limits. I've experienced the latter elsewhere and this manifests very differently. It will instantly and fully disconnect a person from an online game or drop a skype call without the accompanying prolonged lag or distortion of bottlenecked bandwidth.
It happens at all times of day, and does not seem related to our peak times of bandwidth usage, nor the general public's peak times of usage.
We should have enough bandwidh for our usage, and usually we do. Our system is 25/25 Mbps and during our peak use at most we would probably have 1 laptop gaming, 1 HD video stream, and 2 non-HD streams. However, like I said before, the problem seems unrelated to overall bandwidth usage. The same problem occurs even at midnight when our local usage is minimal.
Overall we have 6 laptops, 5 phones, an iPad, 2 microcell signal boosters, and Apple TV, in total connected to the FiOS. We have a property with tenants where the signal is distributed via 3 WiFi routers and one direct ethernet cable to my laptop, and one to the Apple TV.
It happens on devices that are both connected through the WiFi (wife's laptop, phones, iPad) and ethernet (my laptop, Apple TV). It can happen with devices that are a few unobstructed feet from the WiFi router. However, it anecdotely seems to happen more on our phones than laptops.
My hunch is it is something outside our local network. This is because our equipment and usage has basically remained unchanged over the last couple months. (We got one new microcell tower for a different carrier, one new wifi router, but overall same # of people and patterns of usage.) And yet the problem seems to be getting worse. Back in probably early November I don't remember this problem occuring at all.
My second best guess is there are more devices connected to the network than it can handle simultaneously, and it rotates which gets kicked off. Maybe this was occuring before but we didnt realize it.
My third guess is it has to due with signal interference with the various WiFi routers and microcell boosters. However, this seems less likely since it also affects devices connected via ethernet cables.
Any thoughts or advice is much appreciated! Thanks!
-Ned