I've recently been having recurrent internet problems. I thought it was at the BT/ISP end but the engineer that visited said that other than my SNR being low, there was nothing wrong with the BT side of things

Several times a day I lose usable internet. google.com pings should return in 40ms. but when the net starts giving trouble the ping times are more than 1000ms, or they time out. Worst I've seen is 3000ms.

Funny thing was, during the time that the net was being funny, I pinged the router across the WLAN from my PC, and that too, was taking 1000ms+ to return a ping. If I log into the router and use the web based ping in the Diagnostics menu, that too takes over 1000ms to ping google..

I've noticed, If I reboot the routerthen it pretty much behaves as it should and it can do that all day. As soon at I load uTorrent, within 30 seconds the ping times start going wacky and eventually the router breaks down and stops flowing traffic properly (all pings time out)

So, can my 2800 not handle the number of concurrent sessions? Is there some QoS setting ive missed that makes it deliberately throw packets away?
I've 3 VPN dialouts configured on this router also. They predate the problems by many months so i'm not immediately suspecting them. This is the second 2800 router I've had show this exact behaviour; the first I decommissioned, exported the config, imported into the new router and carried on.. but the two routers seem identical in their inability to handle uTorrent activity

Any ideas of things I can check? Thanks

Hello cjad,

Here's a simple test... backup your config and then reset the router back to factory defaults. Then configure the WAN connection only. Test and see if your router falls over.

If it does, then the router doesn't have the balls. If it doesn't, then you know theres something in your config which is causing it to mess up.

You can always reload your config afterwards... should take about 5 mins to test and helps you isolate the problem.

What firmware are you using in your 2800? It matters a great deal, I use a 2800VG with 2.8.2.1 beta to counter a broadcom wifi chipset problem and have utorrent, and do not notice the 2800 balking at utorrent activity nor in 2.8.2 stable firmware either, randomly after extended periods of generic use I have noticed spontaneous router reboots signalled by the syslog suddenly reporting factory set time for a few minutes after a reboot in the syslog router time field.

If you do suspect excessive session count is causing the trouble you could always restrict the sessions given to the computer with utorrent on it to a lower level than it usually shows in the diagnostics traffic graph Sessions display using Bandwidth managment menu Sessions Limit, also fine tuning utorrent settings can be a benifit to optimise the available connetions throughput.

I have the 2710n and p2p ALWAYS kills any network activity.

QoS with the default settings has helped a lot - the defaults seem to work fine, web browsing, email etc improved dramatically and the p2p download speed / sessions 'automagically' drops way down to make way for the real stuff.

Try it!