Serious connection issues

I'm hoping someone might have a theory about this. It has me completely baffled (and unable to use SL for the past few weeks).

Here's the deal. When I'm logged in to SL I only get bandwidth for 10-30 seconds at a time and then it drops down to 0 and stays there for 20-30 seconds or longer. All the sims around me show red on the minimap. It isn't a sim problem since others have no problems there. Needless to say I can't do anything like move, chat, upload, or anything else. What's so puzzling is that I don't notice these issues doing anything else online. I can download large files at a steady 700kbs or more and I can surf the web no problem even while the bandwidth meter in SL is still sitting at 0. Even stranger, the SL meter shows 0% dropped packets and a sim ping time of around 800 msec.

Anyone have any thoughts on this? It really sucks. I haven't been able to do anything in SL for weeks.

Hate to say it. It sounds like an ISP problem, I would contact them and see if they can help

well that would be my first guess as well, and I've had issues with weak signal strenght from them in the past, but it would cause problems with everything not just SL.

comcast?? :\

Unfortunately. Please please FIOS, hurry up and get to my area already!

Beat me to it..

Second guess is wireless. Third would be that you're routing has gone all pear shaped - have you tried turning off your network gear for a while, Chip?

edit: bummer that it's Comcast. You could still giving your network gear a power off for a bit and hope that you've just got a flaky circuit (then get a different one when you power back up) instead of it being them playing packet shaping games on you.

It took having them out here four or five times over the last couple of years before I finally got one of their techs to admit that the signal strength coming in to my house was too weak. They installed a powered splitter but even with that I have to keep my modem in the basement hooked directly to that splitter and use a wireless router and access point to connect up to my office on the top floor. In order the get them to fix it further they'd have to dig up the lines or something to fix the problem before it gets to my house. Odds of that happening are exactly nil. I don't think signal strength is the problem right now though since streaming radio, downloading, and everything else I do is working fine.

The problem with a wireless connection is latency. You said 800ms speed of connection to the SIM, that should be 300ms or less to keep SL stable. Once the SL servers loose your signal, they assume you have logged out, much like a website forum where it times out. I suspect you have problems with the voice client as well?

If possible extend an ethernet cable from your router to your system? That should reduce the latency.

Unfortunately that's not possible. My townhouse is four floors. Your theory is interesting though, but I don't think that's it. I've been using this setup without any problems for months. It occurred to me that while attempting to get the new computer I'm using running stable I disabled the onboard network card and installed an old one I had laying around. I'm thinking perhaps that card is the problem. I have new RAM arriving tomorrow and while I'm mucking about in the innards of my system I'll switch back to the onboard networking and see if that clears it up.

Looks like my theory was correct. I went back to the onboard network card and my bandwidth no longer drops to zero, and my ping times are back to around 75-150ms.

/me w00ts for Chip.

Hey, trashing the old card is way cheaper and less hassle than dealing with daft ISPs....believe me.....my ISP once tried to tell me my signal is too weak after it had worked (a DSL 16,000 line) for a year without problems and I had a hell of a time getting them to actually check their own equipment when, of course, they suddenly noticed it WAS something wrong at their end....