As part of the equipment refresh I did last year to initially combat the problem, I purchased the ASUS Router mentioned above, along with the Arris SB6190 (DOCSIS 3.0, not 3.1). What I didn’t know is there was an issue with that specific model and compatibility with Comcast service, something along the lines of a Puma 6/7 chipset that wouldn’t work with them, despite it being a listed compatible device. I guess it could only be used with their fiber service and not the 800mbps that I currently use. Too late to return it, so I may have to just bite the bullet and get a compatible DOCSIS3.1. Thank you for the valuable input!
This has been added to the list for my weekend networking projects. Thank you!
I just got back from Best Buy with the SB8200 and am setting it up now. As far as QoS, the router I have does support QoS. It’s one of those ROG ASUS gaming routers. I know price doesn’t necessarily mean performance, but the thing was like $350 at the time I purchased it. I thought it would be able to handle all of this, but it’s looking like the Nighthawk I had before this one (at half the price), may have been better equipped for the task. I will follow up once I’ve got everything up and running. Thank you so much for the input!
My work computer is already hard wired. Wife’s isn’t. I’ll add hers via Ethernet and monitor the situation. Thanks for the input!
Thank you for all of these suggestions! These are all going to give me some direction with my little networking project this weekend.
I would love to have the confidence in my company’s IT team, but they are outsourced and just going off the script. I don’t want to regale you with our wonderful cornucopia of ticket resolutions that went nowhere, but one of them did involve them setting up a dummy portal on GlobalProtect for me to connect through. I would hope that this involved assigning a different IP, so I will review the steps in that ticket and make the suggestion. Much appreciated!
This. Thank you for the input. I turned off my routers smart switch, or “Smart Connect,” as ASUS calls it, last year when this problem initially popped up. Everything was fine until about a month ago. I’m glad we are on the same page!
We do not work for the same company. We are both connecting to our employers’ VPNs through our home internet connection.
For the most part, this only pops up when we are both working during the day. We have to be logged in to the employers’ VPNs for the duration of our daily shifts. We both have an XBox Series X (one wired, one WiFi) and other devices on the network, but any connection issues are far and few with any of the other devices. Nothing to make me want to write a Reddit post about. This particular issue has happened so often lately that it prompted this inquiry. I made no major changes to any settings on my network. I have checked to see if anyone was using my WiFi without my knowledge and I wasn’t able to find anything.
This is excellent advice and I will give it a shot!
There’s a lot of good suggestions here, but the modem most likely is the culprit. It’s power source or it’s signal levels. How you get to the signal levels varies by modem and provider but make sure you have a clean line coming into the modem. Use as few splitters as possible (before the modem), use a high quality splitter meant for cable modems, make sure all lines have good crimped connections with no loose or stray wires, and most importantly: cap any unused lines connected to the system. Have the cable company come out and check the levels from the street to the house, sometimes they have a bad crimp or damaged wire, or you’re the last house on that segment and they just haven’t turned the levels up enough for you to work properly. I think your router is new enough that it should allow multiple VPNs through, but some of the other comments lead to a different problem. The subnet you choose for your router, like 192.168.0.1, should not be in the same range or near either of your work VPN assignments. When logged into each, see what you get. If one gives you 10.x.x.x and the other gives you 172.x.x.x, then 192.168.x.x is safe, but if one uses 192.168.x.x, then you may have conflicts even routing issues if servers at work overlap your home subnet. Usually you are safe from this, but it happens.
If you could replace one router with the other, you might experience that one router does VPN differentiating (in NAT) better than the other. There is no set in stone method of doing NAT and different flavors does it differently (seeing as both external and internal IP’s are all unique), but the problem at its core, is still generally hard.
Your ISP may have solutions to help you, it might cost a bit more, but some ISPs are so set on cookie-cutter residential customer configurations, that they might just not be wanting to also (and end up trying to push you into business customer setups, at which point two independent internet connections might be cheaper?).
As far as the puma 6/7 chipsets, usually you want to avoid them due to an issue with latency and packet loss as pretty much every gamer can testify to that got stuck using them years ago. And I also would recommend doing the 3.1 modems as they do channelization a little bit better. As far as what could be causing the disconnections it could be an issue with Comcast as they have always been a pain to anyone using a VPN. You might have to adjust your MTU settings to increase reliability, as that is what we have to have people do on T-Mobile as the default packet size of the VPN is too large for them.
Let us know how this goes. This one interests me, as I also WFH, although I don’t need two VPNs at the moment. =) Still, being the geek I am, I love to learn about stuff like this.
Just checking due to some companies do not allow the same IP to have multiple VPN connections.
any idea what type of VPN it is ? i have seen stupid stuff with port 500 … does that home gateway have a NAT Translations table in it ?
I actually ran into that exact issue tonight. During my testing, assigned IPs to both work clients through the router. My wife’s client connected without issue to her company’s VPN via WiFi, but mine wouldn’t do it when using Ethernet through my work client. What’s weird is that the assigned IP did work when I was using WiFi through my work client. I assigned a different IP for each connection method because it was assigning a different MAC address to my work client for wired vs WiFi. When I removed the assigned IP from my work clients, the Ethernet connection worked perfectly. My wife is currently on her company VPN on a call with India and I’ve been randomly fussing around and connecting to my company VPN while she working. No trouble yet.
With regards to the cables/connections, I did a refresh of all of my cables last year (Coax, Cat5 to Cat6, splitters), but I haven’t had the ISP come out to test everything. The real test will come on Monday when I actually taking calls while she is connecting to the VPN. Hopefully the modem upgrade was the culprit, as it was the only thing I didn’t upgrade when I did the refresh last year (due to the SB6190s incompatibility). We appreciate all of the wonderful feedback that this sub has given us. Will update throughout the weekend as well as when Monday comes along!
Just got home from Best Buy with an Arris SB8200, DOCSIS3.1. I will keep everyone posted with my testing and will definitely mess with the MTU settings.