@davy3c wrote:
I did some experimentation making Teams video calls over WiFi by moving my laptop to my living room, and it works perfectly. I then tried plugging my Mac directly into the router using Ethernet, and the crash happens again.
This indeed sounds pretty uncommon. In fact I don’t believe your device is generating different types of Ethernet frames or data packets on Ethernet as the software stack is the same essentially. However the Ethernet card driver might be involved in some checksum calculation etc. So you might also try different drivers.
The part “plugging my Mac directly” is not fully clear. Does your Mac have an Ethernet port or not? If it has, why are you using a USB-C type Ethernet adapter then? If it doesn’t I suspect you tried to hook up your mac via USB-C Ethernet Adapter and a short Cat5e+ Cable to the internet box and you could reproduce the issue.
If the latter one is the case then you still did not completely rule out a potential issue with your USB-C adapter. Even if replaced. As you said it might work with the same chip and/or driver. Also I would still not eliminate the possibility of an electronical interference. Perhaps not radio based but wire-based. Remember that if you hook up your Mac to your IB via cable you generate an electrical connection. If the power supply or a broken component is causing noise on the line it could actually cause the IB to lose sync.
Just as an example (might not be your actual problem):
- Potential defect on the camera module of the Mac (or PSU issue)
- Turning on the internal camera on the Mac might inject noise on the “ground” plane of the macbook
- Ground plane is connected to your Ethernet and potentially directly wired to the shield of the Ethernet cable
- So your “noisy” ground would be connected to the ground of your IB
- Noise might cause IB to lose line sync on DSL
Well, without knowing all the schematics and/or measure your equipment it’s impossible to say if this is potenitally an issue.
You might try if the same thing happens also with a different Mac (not sure if you have the possibility to test) or with another Ethernet adapter (potentially cheap Fast-Ethernet USB-A type with USB-C adapter would do).
Another option would be to try a network isolator like this one.
I am not saying it’s impossible that a certain data package could crash router services, but I think it’s pretty unlikely.
As you already found out connecting a WLAN Box to the cable in your attic office and connecting your Mac to the WLAN does not cause issues. In this case you should see the same traffic pattern on the wire then and your IB is supposed to crash too if this would be the case.
Another thought: Did you try to connect your Mac to one of the Ethernet ports on the WLAN Box?
So your network topology would look as follows:
Mac -> USB-C -> Ethernet -> WLAN box -> Ethernet cable to your living room -> IB
Perhaps the WLAN box ethernet would filter some of the (potentially injected) noise and stop your IB from rebooting - or it might kill your WLAN box then 😉
As of your reply I just see that if you create a galvanic separation between your Mac and the physical network (by using WLAN) you eliminate the problem. So a network isolator or using the WLAN box in between might help if the WLAN box is less sensitive to such noise - but remember you might still have some broken equipment causing potential electrical problems.
