I switched to Fibre to the Home, 1.5GB/s, in February 2023. My set-up is quite standard, a Bell Giga Hub running my network with a couple of PCs, an i-phone, Andriod phone, a couple of i-pads. Most are connected by WiFi, one PC is connected by Ethernet cable. Nothing fancy, modem settings are pretty much as received.
Immediately after installation, we started experiencing internet outages several times a day, each outage 3-6 minutes duration. Everything (even the wired PC) experiences the outage at about the same time (so it is unrelated to the WiFi). We found that outages were correlated to the use of the Wyze Cam app (wyze.com). We use the app to stream video from a remote camera (on a different network). The use of this app does not always force out network down, probably about 50% of the time. But, almost all outages of 3-6minutes happen when the wyze app is used. (There are shorter outages of a minute or so that are unrelated to the wyze app.)
The anatomy of a typical outage looks like this: We will open the wyze app and start the video streaming. At this point, the CPU usage in the modem often spikes to >30% (as high as 70%) (up from the usual 0-5%). Pings from a PC to the modem (via ethernet, not WiFi) take longer (up to several hundred ms , as opposed the the usual 1ms). The home phone (on the phone port of the hub) sometimes become erratic, audio breaking up several times a second. This only lasts for maybe a minute, then the phone, CPU, and ping times return to normal, but the internet on all computers is down. I can ping the modem from a computer on my network just fine. I can ping the outside world from the modem (using a modem utility) just fine. But I cannot ping from the computer to the outside world. It returns "Request timed out". All other computer browsers return messages like "xxx not found", or just do nothing. This will go on for 3-6 minutes, and then everything starts working again. There is nothing interesting on the modem system log. The wyze app (running from an i-pad or i-phone) is working perfectly all through this. Sometimes we run the wyze app for a half hour, sometimes for 2 minutes, but the outage is usually 3-6 minutes (ie, the length of the outage is unrelated to how long the Wyze app is running)
I have a PC (the Ethernet cable one, no WiFi) pinging the outside world every 30 seconds, keeping records for me, and I have about 6 weeks of records now, well over 100 drops.
@BellPatricia and @BellNick has been collecting data, but have not offered any suggestions or solutions. (except turning off UPnP, made no difference) Bell service has been linked in. They made 2 service calls, replaced the modem (with an identical model), replaced the fibre to the modem, and they connected to a different circuit in the box behind the house. No difference. The technician concluded that it's a problem with the app. I don't accept this because: 1) wyze worked fine when we were on DSL. 2) Relatives of ours also use the same app with the same camera without issue. 3) it works with Rogers (using cellular data) 4) There are no issues like this listed on the wyze site (though I am asking them about it now) and 5) The wyze app runs at about 60-200kb/s (and I have verified that this is approximately right), so < 0.1% of our 1.5Gb/s bandwidth, this should be easy! Furthermore, our neighbours are experiencing some drops (they got fibre a week after we did), but they have not noticed a pattern yet.
So my question to anyone out there who has read this far (thank you for reading!):
-In general, should an app (no matter how poorly it is written) be able to bring down the entire network?
-Do you use the wyze camera app with Bell? Which modem do you have? Does the camera work, have you looked for dropped internet?
-I am, at best, a computer hack, and don't know anything about internet protocol. Do these symptoms point to anything?
-Can you suggest other diagnostics that might help us narrow down the problem?
Thanks for listening... GR
