OK IDNetters... here's a puzzle. Losing FTTP pppoe connection

[doc_holiday]

We recently bought and moved to a new home. I was delighted to learn that it had a FTTP connection.  Sadly, we have had problems on multiple levels since we moved in, including a router less than a year old developing a fault.

Slowly but truly we have persevered and the connection is smoothing out more and more, but I have one last problem that I have not been able to figure out.  Occasionally, with no warning or pattern, we lose our pppoe connection.  Sometimes we will have a solid connection for several days, and then sometimes we will drop the connection several times in the same day.

This most recent occurrence happened while we were asleep while the connection was idle.  When we got up this morning to the dead connection, the ONT showed a connection light to the exchange and it also showed a connection to our router, but looking at the router dashboard the connection is down. A simple reboot fixes the problem, but we'd like to ultimately figure out why.  FTTP connections are not exactly cutting edge technology anymore.

Because of our extensive testing for other issues, everything on the consumer end has been changed at one point or the other... router, cables, etc. It's all new several times over. So I can start swapping out stuff again, but it's time consuming and really feels we are starting to shoot at things in the dark.

Doing a google search on our symptoms, I'm not the first to experience this on FTTP, but there's no clear pattern of how it has been solved.  So, I'd like to throw this one out there to see what you all would suggest. 

Any ideas, thoughts or suggestions, even crazy ones would be welcomed.  After fighting this FTTP connection for about six weeks, we are pretty much ready for anything, maybe going back to trusty ole' ADSL! 

[Simon]

Wow!  Long time no see, Doc!  Hope you're doing OK.   

I'm still on trusty (crusty?) old ADSL2+, so can't help with your new fangled fibre query, but I'm sure somebody will be along soon that can.

[zappaDPJ]

I'm on a fairly flaky FTTC connection which drops out at least once a week usually after midnight except this week when it went down one afternoon. I'm usually on-line when it happens and most of the time it'll reconnect if I restart the modem/router which thinks it's still connected.

It may well not be the same issue but because of the timing I've always assumed it's down to some kind of maintenance.

[L2020]

If this has happened with two different routers of different makes then I would suspect the ONT.  It could be the Ethernet port is damaged and dropping out briefly causing the PPPoE to go down.  Usually the router will bring it back up but occasionally the router doesn't reconnect the PPPoE automatically.  Is there anything in the router logs that states what is happening?

Otherwise it isn't uncommon for PPPoE to go down overnight when maintenance takes place, maybe no more than once a month perhaps as a worst case, and again not all routers bring the PPPoE back up automatically.

It would also be worth raising it with support to see if they can check how the disconnections are being logged, as you really shouldn't be dropping connections during the day.  If you are pretty certain it isn't your equipment because you have swapped it then it's likely a problem at the ONT or further out on the Openreach network.

I've had FTTP for 14 months now and it has never dropped the PPPoE during the day, only on an odd occasion during the early hours and as predicted by the ISPs support page showing planned maintenance.  So accepting drops during the day I certainly wouldn't.

[doc_holiday]

I've had FTTP for 14 months now and it has never dropped the PPPoE during the day, only on an odd occasion during the early hours and as predicted by the ISPs support page showing planned maintenance.  So accepting drops during the day I certainly wouldn't.

Thanks everyone for the input and support. I agree. Connection drops in the day should never happen, yet I have had a number of them.  Under a load, but we don't saturate our connection or idle at night when we are asleep. No pattern, but the end result is the same.  Bad, bad, bad. 

I moved my home network over to an Edgerouter ERX SPF which is an incredible piece of kit for the money. I did some reading and there have been some complaints about bugs that have crept into the new 2.0 version of EdgeOS, so I rolled it back to 1.10.11 which is held in high regard by the Ubiquiti community. This is a long shot, but as everything else on the consumer end has been replaced several times over chasing down other issues, my hope (and hypotheses) is that the connection drops were not related to my earlier issues and that they were introduced when I installed the Edgerouter.

What I noticed is that when I rolled back the firmware, my pings to the IDNet dns increased about .500ms. I know this is an inconsequential increase, but it is a clear increase. The connection has now been up for three days with no drops. So if I have had no drops by this time next week, it might suggest that whilst maybe something in this new firmware is more efficient, it is buggy or isn't as robust. This is only a guess as this would require me to go deeper into the EdgeOS logs and is likely beyond my skillset to diagnose, so I can only report what I am observing in the performance of our connection.

So, we will see.  I am a latency and contention fanatic as this is always more important to me than speed (I am only on an 80/20 FTTP connection), but stability is even more important. I'll report my results next week. If it starts dropping again, then it increasingly points to the ONT or something at the exchange. I would rather not install a fourth router to prove it!

Be safe and have a great rest of the weekend.

[doc_holiday]

Update: Still stable pppoe connection.  We'll see how this week goes.

With that in place, I did a deep dive to get ivp6 going.  This was my first adventure into ivp6 and it forced me to get further into EdgeOS, but I got there in the end. 

Providing the connection continues to be stable, it is now down to tuning and insuring that my config is as clean as possible.

[L2020]

Glad you got it sorted out. I use pfSense which is handy as you can upgrade to faster hardware but the UI and software remains the same, so just the one learning curve 

Good to hear you've IPv6 running.  If you've not found it already a good testing site is https://test-ipv6.com/  and hopefully you get a 10/10.

[doc_holiday]

Yup. Got. 10/10 and pppoe is stable.

I am considering moving to opnsense long term. I ran pfsense years ago.