Question regarding the built in SPI firewall

[NoanSuomy]

Alright I'll try to keep this short.

We recently got a Cisco DPC3825 DOCSIS 3.0 Gateway from Rogers since we're under their Rogers Extreme package and because the last gateway they gave people under that plan was garbage.

Now, when we got the gateway, I went ahead and forwarded all the ports I would need for my Xbox Live, I also went ahead and manually set up our primary and secondary DNS servers as google's (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) I did this on our last gateway as well (though only with a primary DNS) because Roger's DNS is very unreliable and google's proved to be much better.

Now I'm stating this becuase that's all the alterations made to the gateway.

Now here's our problem with it.

The internet, though very fast, is occasionally choppy. Occasionally, it will not slow down, but cut off all together. So let's say I'm buffering a video, all of a sudden the video will simply stop buffering and will only start doing so again if I reload the page or try to move specifically load a part of the video.

This also translates to terribly unreliable connections when I'm playing online. The connection will fly from excellent to terribly erratically.

So now I'm wondering how can I deal with this. Do I have to disable the SPI firewall and blocking unknown internet requests? Is it the google DNSs I've set up that somehow don't work with this gateway?

Any help would be appreciated.

[jasbryan]

Noan,

This has nothing to do with DNS. Once the connection is made to the servers by Domain Name and a connection is made; this doesn't have anything else to do with DNS. This is a connection issue, and sounds more like the connection between your house and the pole. I would get your ISP to send out a technician to test the line between your house and the pole. I had very similar problem and the tech said it was because the frequency on the line was to high and causing my similar problems. This would be the first place to start trouble shooting.

Thanks,

Jasbryan

Cisco Support Engineer

.:|:.:|:.

[NoanSuomy]

Ah thank you, we used to have a lot of problems with Rogers' DNS and it would cause us to suddenly lose internet access (and it would even say the Domain Name Server was not responding), so that's why I suspected the DNS might be a problem.

However I'll def call a technician to take a look at it. However we've only really noticed this problem once we got this new gateway, so I'm not too sure.

Thanks

[jasbryan]

Noan,

When this happens how long of a window do you have ? You can send a simple ping out to the Internet via command prompt as this is happening to see the reply or request time out information and post. Also does this Cisco gateway modem have a syslog output on it. This isn't a device that is support at the Small Business Support so not really familiar with it. You could possibly set up logging and send that log information out to a syslog server and see if you can capture any system logs pertaining to your problem.

Thanks,

Jasbryan

Cisco Support Engineer

.:|:.:|:.

[NoanSuomy]

It really just seems to be a split second thing. The page will simply stop loading for a second and won't start again until we reload the page. So for example a video will suddenly stop buffering, and we'll have to force it to load that speicific part. It won't stay off for any noticable length of time, it'll just stop trying to load until we reload.

And I might try sending the logs, I'll be calling a technician first though from my ISP to see if this can be resolved.

Thanks