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At the shared house I live in, internet seems to work fine. For instance, I seem to have no issues when watching a movie on Netflix or a video on YouTube, or when I download some document or other stuff.

But there's two things that happen consistently:

  1. When I'm on video call via my smartphone, which is connected to the WiFi, it often happens that the call freezes for me for several seconds (it happens a few times in a 1h call, to give a rough number), but the other person tells that they could still hear me say "I see you frozen, this connection is so annoying" and stuff.
  2. When I'm connected to my work office's machine (I estabilish the connection via VPN from my laptop, which is too connected via WiFi to the internet), sometimes the connection freezes for several seconds, but when it recovers everything I did in the meanwhile is there, just like there was no freeze at all. This happens both via SSH and via VNC, and at the same time, in the sense that I mostly use SSH, and as soon as I see the freeze, I have the time to jump to the VNC connection and see it frozen too (e.g. I see the clock's seconds not changing).

Here's my reasoning:

  • Point 1 makes me exclude that the issue might be related to the VPN mentioned in point 2.
  • I suspect that the problem is not apparent when watching movies on Netflix/YouTube because of buffering.
  • And I suspect that the problem might be due to somebody in the house making unreasonable use of the bandwidth.

Not sure if any of the above suspicions are legitimate/meaningful, but I'd like at least to measure the kind of "outage" I described, by other means than experiencing screen freezes.

Generally when I'm working I'm not on video call via my smartphone, and viceversa, so I haven't verified yet if point 1 and 2 above are actually happening at the same time. I should probably do that, somehow.

As regards the laptop, I'm on ArchLinux. The smartphone is a OnePlus.

Enlico
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  • The problem is lack of bandwidth. The ssh sessions resume because of the design of tcp/ip. The lack of bandwidth could be wifi congestion or trying to use more then the available bandwidth. Very often audio is prioritised on congested links. Monitoring tjis in a SOHO environment is very difficult - you need a router (and/or wifi gear, but realistically a router) with advanced functionality like bandwidth monitoring... Most of these routers will also have QiS to allow you to better utilise the connection as well... – davidgo May 23 '22 at 06:14
  • (Also, you may be suffering from buffer bloat) – davidgo May 23 '22 at 06:15
  • What OS are you on? If Windows, then for a basic wi-fi signal strength test, run `netsh.exe wlan show networks mode=Bssid` periodically, and monitor `Signal` for the wi-fi SSID(s) you care about. Also, run `pathping.exe targethost.domain.com` to get a good feel of latency and packet loss at every hop alone the route from your PC to your targethost. – leeharvey1 May 23 '22 at 13:53
  • I'm on ArchLinux. – Enlico May 23 '22 at 14:09

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