Best Freeware to Check Internet?

[zippyfrog]

Recently my T-Mobile internet has been very flakey. Some points of the day I am getting 400+ megs down, but other times I can't connect to the internet, and when I do a ping, response times are horrible. Right now everything is great, but last night my ping times were over 300ms to google.com, and about 10% packet loss. This has been going on since June 21, which ironically is the day after T-Mobile supposedly started geofencing the gateways so they could only connect to the cell towers closest to the address the gateway is registered at. No problem there as I am at my registered address.

At first I thought it was a DNS issue, so I have tried different DNS servers. But the more I look at it, I think it is the connection to the cell tower. The past 2 weeks, my RSRP has been between -93 and -111 and "poor"; previously when I looked at that value, I was in the -70 to -75 range. So it makes me think this whole thing is tower related. Every other metric on the app shows Excellent or Good.

So curious - is there any freeware out there that I could have constantly running on my computer checking internet uptime? Or being able to track RSRP values throughout the day? I used to have a app that constantly pinged, but I don't think that is what I am looking for. Any ideas on freeware I could run on my computer so I can see when I lose internet connection?

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Try PingPlotter


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnR35pgvoKw

 

[rvvaquero]

Recently my T-Mobile internet has been very flakey. Some points of the day I am getting 400+ megs down, but other times I can't connect to the internet, and when I do a ping, response times are horrible. Right now everything is great, but last night my ping times were over 300ms to google.com, and about 10% packet loss. This has been going on since June 21, which ironically is the day after T-Mobile supposedly started geofencing the gateways so they could only connect to the cell towers closest to the address the gateway is registered at. No problem there as I am at my registered address.

At first I thought it was a DNS issue, so I have tried different DNS servers. But the more I look at it, I think it is the connection to the cell tower. The past 2 weeks, my RSRP has been between -93 and -111 and "poor"; previously when I looked at that value, I was in the -70 to -75 range. So it makes me think this whole thing is tower related. Every other metric on the app shows Excellent or Good.

So curious - is there any freeware out there that I could have constantly running on my computer checking internet uptime? Or being able to track RSRP values throughout the day? I used to have a app that constantly pinged, but I don't think that is what I am looking for. Any ideas on freeware I could run on my computer so I can see when I lose internet connection?

I had T-Mo Home Internet for a few months and that was my exact results. Great most of the time and totally unusable other times. I finally gave up on it. If it ain't reliable, it's useless IMO. I"m back on my ATT Mobley plan, slow most of the time but usually dependable.

 

[dishdude]

I've had T-Mobile for a little over 2 years now and it's been great, more reliable than the Cox service it replaced. It isn't perfect, but it's greater than 99% reliable.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Updated my post above with a video showing how it works.

 

[zippyfrog]

I've had T-Mobile for a little over 2 years now and it's been great, more reliable than the Cox service it replaced. It isn't perfect, but it's greater than 99% reliable.

I love my T-Mobile internet - would never go back to AT&T. I am at 19 months with it, and this is really the first extended issue I have had with it. Early on it completely went out, but I received an email from T-Mobile afterwards that there was an issue with a tower.

One thing that I noticed in the T-Mobile Internet App - if I run the helper on where to point the gateway, I am now being asked to point it in a different direction. When I setup the gateway originally, the tower I was supposed to point was northeast. Now it wants me to point to the northwest tower. Straight line, the northwest tower is 1.33 miles away, whereas the Northeast tower is 1.50 miles away. However, cellmapper.net shows that the tower 1.33 miles away has a stronger signal in the opposite direction than my house, and when I turn on the "cells", the cell from that tower doesn't overlap my house. The "cell" overlay from the 1.50 mile tower does. I really wonder if something changed on June 21st - if they really started tying Gateways to cell towers. I don't know if there is a way for me to see if I can tell what tower I am connecting to, but it would be interesting to know if it is limiting me to the closest tower, even though the cell appears to not cover my house, thus a weak signal.

Here is pingplotter - started out fine for about 30 minutes, then the packet loss started and hasn't slowed down. With this packet loss, there is where everything slows down so noticeably, and sometimes it doesn't let me surf.

 

[zippyfrog]

Scott Greczkowski - thank you for showing me this program! I have let it run for 48 hours, and you can see what it was over the weekend, then shortly after midnight this morning, all the packet loss stopped. Only 1 single line all day today with packet loss. Pings are every 2.5 seconds. I have no idea what happened - I am guessing that is 100% a T-Mobile thing as nothing has changed on my network setup at all.