Ask HN: Investigating EM Noise
Here's an overview of what's happening and what's been investigated:
- First of all, I haven't always had this issue. I've been in this house for 2 years now, and didn't have any problems until earlier this year.
- I first started seeing problems with Zoom. Specifically my outgoing packets. If I look at the Zoom statistics, I'll receive 1080p video at 30fps but my outgoing video will be 180p and under 10fps typically. I'll often see 30%+ packet loss on the outgoing requests.
- It's slowly gotten worse as general web browsing hangs a lot. By which I mean, it'll regularly but randomly take a second or so for a website to resolve (and I'm talking big highly available services).
- I got to the point where I thought this was related to my ISP. They've sent multiple techs out. They've replaced the modem, the splitters on the cable, etc. Interestingly they noticed that there were maintenance issues with our local box, but even after those were addressed the problems have persisted. So it looks like the connection to the ISP is fine (I'm not seeing any codeword errors on my modem which I once did).
- Following all of that, my ISP ended up sending a specialist because apparently there's a lot of noise at my house. I live in a town house. The neighbours to my left and right have both changed in the past few months. Seeing as how my network topology has not changed in well over a year, and I didn't have this issue to begin with, that leads me to believe they might be the issue?
- It's really affecting my Macs more than anything. If I do a packet loss test, they'll have rolling spikes of up to 200-400ms, where a baseline would be more like 40ms. Interestingly, my gaming laptop will see 60ms flat while the Macs will be spiking.
- My girlfriend has been having problems with her Bluetooth mouse. Full battery, but the mouse will skip, miss clicks, etc.
- Seems to happen at all hours. Especially a problem during the day, but it happens at night too.
With all that in mind, what should I be doing next? The ISP has found a lot of noise in my immediate vicinity, how might I find the root of the issue? I'm not sure what tools I'd need to investigate that myself. It's driving me insane (I have to spend a lot of time on Zoom these days, and it's affecting my work).