Giga Hub: 30%+ intermittent WAN packet loss while wired directly, LAN pings perfect, no WAN events in hub log (Montreal area)

[JohnPork]

Hey all,

Curious if anyone else in the Montreal area (or anywhere) is seeing this on their Giga Hub lately, because I've tested this pretty thoroughly and I'm running out of things to blame on my end.

The symptom: recurring bursts of total packet loss lasting 10 to 30 seconds, multiple times per hour, hitting every device in the house. Between the bursts the connection is flawless, 3 to 5 ms to 8.8.8.8 with barely any jitter. It's fully on or fully off, no gradual degradation.

What I've tested so far:

I normally run an eero mesh in Advanced DMZ, but I took it out of the equation completely: MacBook wired straight into the Giga Hub with a USB-C Ethernet adapter, Wi-Fi off (I even logged the active route interface on every ping to make sure macOS wasn't silently falling back to Wi-Fi). Same problem, actually worse, around 30% loss with 20+ second blackouts.

Then the interesting one: I ran two pings simultaneously from the wired MacBook, one to 8.8.8.8 and one to the Giga Hub itself at 192.168.2.1, once per second each with timestamps. Every single ping to the hub succeeded, steady 1 to 3 ms, while pings to the internet timed out in bursts during the exact same seconds. So the LAN side is perfect and the failure is entirely on the WAN side.

The weird part: I checked the hub's system log for the exact windows where I measured the blackouts, and there's nothing. No PPP drops, no WAN events, no errors. Just my own Ethernet port connects and the scheduled TR-069 check-ins, which completed fine. The hub seems to think its WAN session is up the whole time while packets silently disappear.

So my current theories, in no particular order: degraded optical signal on the line, the hub's WAN side dying intermittently while keeping the session alive, or possibly something related to the recent firmware update, since I saw the thread here about PPPoE issues after it and "silently dropping WAN traffic" sounds awfully familiar.

Questions for the community:

Is anyone else seeing this pattern recently, especially since the latest firmware? Short total outages with nothing in the log?

For those who've had similar symptoms before, what did it turn out to be? Line issue, hub replacement, config problem?

Does anyone know what firmware version their hub is on and whether rolling behavior changed after the update?

Happy to share my ping logs if anyone wants to compare. I'll be calling support separately to get light levels checked, but I wanted to see what the community's experience is first.

[Vanadiel]

I would check first to see if the Guard feature is on or off: Guard feature. 

Note: this setting is not available from the modem menu. It is only available from the Bell WiFi application.

If that does not do anything I would power cycle the modem, followed by ping's from within the modem menu rather than a connected device. There is a ping option somewhere around the speed test option. 

If the ping there is stable, but not stable using a device then that would rule out the modem and point towards a problem on the WAN side, which could be temporary in nature.

You could also check the modem display to see if any error codes happen to pop up when this packet loss issue occurs.