Tracking down the cause of loss of network connectivity

Question

I have been having issues with short (seconds, but long enough to break a TCP connection) periods of loss of internet connectivity. I have tracked this down to what appears to be an actual loss of connectivity with my router (a BT Home Hub 4, provided by my ISP / landlord, I wont be able to get this changed without a good explanation).

I tried making a simple program using IcmpSendEcho (to 192.168.1.254), which will at these points give error 11010 "Error due to lack of resources." which doesn't seem to really tell me anything more than "ping" does...

Is there anything I can do to get a more detailed explanation, or at least work my way to a conclusion?

I am thinking of monitoring it over direct Ethernet, but I have experienced this even in the same room with WiFi, so don't think there should be that much interference (and if that is possible, what could be a source, how to prove it, and what can be done about it?). But otherwise this is really not something I have ever seen before...

Answer 1

It is worth trying to connect via cable (I assume you are using WiFi) to see if the issue is WiFi-specific or not (being in the same room with your access point does not necessarily mean you won't face interference problems).

You can get a picture of what's going on in your wireless network with inSSIDer or a similar tool. Maybe changing to a less busy channel would help.

For a deeper debugging of the issues I would recommend using Wireshark.