Intermittent Internet Connection Problem

I've been having problems with my internet the last week or so. It started about 3-4 days ago, my internet became extremely intermittent and i'm NOT using wireless. It would drop out every 30 secs - 2 mins. At first i would just do a power cycle and it would fix itself, but still disconnect repeatedly anyway. Eventually I stopped trying power cycles, and the connection would keep fixing itself after a few minutes but still be intermittent.

At one point I got so frustrated I actually sat and stared at my modem for 5 minutes and watched the lights to see it drop out and literally count how long it takes between each drop out.

I got into contact with Verizon through Live Chat and the first time my internet obviously worked through the whole process and they even took over my computer and did some things to "fix it", and literally the second after they did whatever they did and i exited the session my internet dropped again. So I proceeded to put all my network settings back to default within my modem / router page and called it a night.

The next day and following day my internet worked perfectly fine, for the whole days and nights. Now today it started being intermittent again. Each time i try and do Live Chat with Verizon i can't even get through a session before it times out and i get no answers to help. I also can't call their support because we use Vonage so No Internet = No Phone. I tried using my cell phone but my call drops too much inside the house while i'm trying to do whatever they say. I'm trying to find out the problem / fix it myself before I have to get a technician out here to check it out.

I've read somewhere that i could put in some line on the command prompt to ping overnight to see when it's dropping out but i couldn't get it to work. It was something like "ping "Ip Address" -n36000 >filename.txt" First off i don't know what IP Address i should be checking, my own, or some other one, second i don't know the proper way to type that out. The second option i saw was them saying to do a Batch file to check it further which i didn't understand either.

Normally when my internet is out right dead my PC will say there is no connection or it's limited but that message doesn't even come up. I can also access my modem / router settings on my web browser perfectly fine to see the status when normally if my net is dead i can't access that page either.

So i'm here to ask what exactly I should be checking and how I should go about checking it, in detail if possible? Hopefully something I can notice between when the connection is working and when it's not working. I can also access the System Log of the Gateway but most of that stuff I don't understand. I see a lot of DNS request timeouts in a row at least.

My info:
Provider = Verizon DSL
Modem / Router = Actiontec GT704WG
OS = Windows XP

Sorry for the long post.

 

I would get Verizon to check out your line and modem/router. Could be a fault with either one.
Once that is checked out, if you still have problems, post back with the symptoms as you have done.
Good Luck.