Broadband disconnected at 9 every night

[#1]

I don’t know if anyone can help
I don’t know if Plusnet stop their call centre support at 8pm because they know about the issue
All I do know is that between 9 and 10 every night, our broadband just stops working. Often multiple times.
I have had them out before because we were having issues but it keeps happening again.
Today I got my bill and I wondered why I bother paying for it when I can’t use the internet when I sit down to use it!
Can anyone help with anything or is it a case of ‘they’re just throttling it because unlimited doesn’t mean unlimited’?!
Thanks for any help even if it’s just a ‘I feel your pain’ comment 😀

[#2]

Hi @QC,

I'm sorry to hear that you're experiencing this issue. I've had a look at your connection log and whilst the connection isn't dropping every night during these hours, it does seem to happen 2 or 3 times a week. When the connection drops out, are you switching any other devices on in the property? As an extension to that, is anything happening in your local area around this time? (such as streetlights turning on for example)

Our line tests haven't picked up any underlying fault conditions, so at this stage it's a case of narrowing down where the issue might lie as much as possible. My last question for now would be, have you been able to carry out any troubleshooting steps and if so, which ones have you attempted?

[#3]

Hi AJ
Thanks for your response. It has so far happened every night this week and last week and we were away the week before that so I have no idea if it was happening then.
At that time, nothing changes. Street lights are already on, there is no extra traffic, we switch off mobile devices so we can watch tv - but it’s not when we start watching tv, it’s after a little while (so about 20 past 9) - like clockwork.
I follow the video online, I check the phone line, I restart, I make sure phones are not connected to wifi, it’s literally trying to power a Fire stick.
It happens later on at night or not at all if we haven’t been using wifi in the day - which makes me think it’s a throttling thing otherwise I can’t understand why it would be happening.
I will report back tonight based on what happens later… we’ve had two working from home today so we might not make it til 9 o’clock!

[#4]

Thanks for getting back to us. If you're rebooting the router every time this happens then this may be having an adverse affect on the line and our tests. It seems like this is occurring to devices connecting to the router over Wi-Fi from what you've posted so far. I think the best way to approach this would be by doing two things at once; firstly, I think it would be best to not reboot the router over the next few days and see if this has any affect on the quality of the connection, secondly, I believe that splitting the Wi-Fi channels that your router is operating on could help prevent some devices from losing their connection to the router. For reference, we have a guide on how to do this here.

I hope this helps, but if you have any queries or issues then please don't hesitate to get back to us and we'll be more than happy to discuss the case further.

[#5]

Hi Alex - so I haven’t rebooted the router, I followed the instructions to split the channels and added the FireStick to the newly created channel…. Sadly the wifi only made it to 10 to 9 tonight so one of the earliest occurrences but I have been using wifi quite a bit today so looks like it couldn’t limp past 9pm sadly.
I’m at a loss of what to do. We rely on wifi for our tv connection and I went with Plusnet as it had the fastest speeds in the area apparently but it’s really not working out for us right now.
Any more suggestions would be greatly welcomed

[#6]

Hi @QC, thanks for getting back to us, I'm sorry for the issues you are having with your service and that the steps provided haven't helped.

I don't think there is any correlation between your usage and the drops occurring; I have checked your daily usage for the month so far and there's still drops happening on days where the usage was minimal and also on some of the days with higher usage, there was no drop.

Just out of curiosity, what speeds are you seeing on a wired connection?

If you have ran through all the troubleshooting steps and the issue is ongoing, I think the best thing is if you raise a fault here: https://faults.plus.net for further investigation and we take it from there.