Hello everyone,

I have a long-standing support issue with my ISP about poor Internet connectivity provided over a wireless link. The hardware at my end is a routerboard 711 with a 23 DBI antenna, I have line of sight, and a decent signal strength (around -75 dB). My main problem is that I have significant packet loss towards my first IP hop, the hop that crosses the wireless connection. I also have varying ping times, from 20 ms to 3 seconds (at rare times). My quest is to figure out the cause of these issues, whether it is packet drops on the widest link that cause retransmissions, or whether the problems lie in the network of my ISP.

They recently replaced my antenna, and I haven't yet sent back the old antenna, which means that I can use this for debugging purposes. Obviously I am not able to log in to the antenna that is in service because my ISP will not provide me with the access information. However, I have been able to reset the old antenna and gain access. What I want to do in order to figure out what happens on the wireless link is to listen to the packets that are transmitted from my antenna in service and see whether packets are frequently repeated/retransmitted.

I guess this requires the old system that I have gained access to to be put into promiscuous mode on the Wi-Fi side, and log all incoming packets either to file or to some kind of network stream/terminal. Is this possible? And if so, would anyone care to guide me through the process?

I'm getting kind of desperate. I have fought with this issue for nearly a year and I am not able to gain access to any decent support guys at my ISP. I have no other access options. I've set up monitoring stations at three of my neighbours who are connected to the same ISP to see whether they have similar problems. It turns out that two of them do, and the last one has no problems whatsoever. There are also periods where my network seems to function without problems, but it is difficult to relate this to weather issues or other cyclic factors such as people coming home from work.

I have a monitoring webpage set up at ec2.stallfellen.com/cgi-bin/smokeping.cgi that gathers data from myself, all my neighbours, my workplace (Simula) and the server that hosts smokeping at Amazon EC2.

The best way would of course be if I could get access to the antenna that is in use, but I guess this is kind of difficult without any access credentials...

I'm looking forward to your replies.

Regards,
kolaf