Why internet keeps on disconnecting and extremely slow

Recently I noticed extremely slow internet connection and it keeps on disconnecting regularly. If you are experiencing such symptoms in your work or home network, you need to act fast.

Let us see the symptoms in details

• Internet speed is considerably slow
• Internet keeps on dropping and coming back
• When you visit a new website most of the time it says page cannot be found
• Web pages load without images and styles.
• Sometimes you might have to restart the router in order to get the internet back.
• Ping command will take longer and frequent timeouts.

If you are experiencing any of these problems with your internet connection, please go through the following checklist.

First, check with your internet service provider whether there is a problem with the internet connection. You might able to check if there is any scheduled system maintenance going on with the service provider website or by calling them. If there is nothing wrong at their end, you have to move to the next step.

Check all the computers connected to the internet whether any of the machines using peer to peer, or torrent downloading programs as these programs can kill the connection speed.

If that is not the case, you might have to check each machine for send and receive packets. In windows machines you can simply check that in Local Area connection. Alternatively, you can use this command in command prompt to check both sent and receive bytes and packets.

If you notice large numbers in send and receive packets without internet activity then there might be virus or Trojan infection. In our case, couple of computers were infected with Trojans that killed the local area network.

You can use softwares like etherboy or wireshark to check the network statistics to understand which machines are sending more packets. However, if it is a small network you can simply remove one computer at time from the router and check the internet connection status-using ping command.

Anyway I would recommend to install Malwarebyte which is free for all your computers and scan them out.