Periodical network downstream outage

Few weeks ago I started experiencing regular network outages. With seemingly high accuracy any downstream operation is paused for ~1s every ~12s.

This experience goes along with what Task Manager shows during a Skype-call:

As you can see, downstream data rate drops to 0 regularly (1 grid cell width equals 4s).

Further things I know, found out or have tried so far:

• upstream is unaffected, as shown by Task Manager but also confirmed by Skype-counterparts who can hear me uninterrupted
• this also means that the network connection per se is not disrupted (downloads are also unaffected)
• also it is not an issue of external hardware I depend on (WiFi-router, ...) as it even affects downstream-connections against localhost! Sometimes I use Hyper-V virtual machines (running on the same PC), which you can connect to using Remote Desktop. The video signal (i.e. the stream I receive from my very own PC) is also paused in the same fashion
• neither Resource Monitor nor WireShark nor Event Viewer show suspicious/unexpected activity in those intervals
• booting a live-OS does not show the behavior, so I guess it is no hardware issue

Reinstalling Windows would probably resolve the issue, but as I did not find any useful resource concerning this weird issue, I thought it might be worth spreading and analyzing a little more first!

Solution 1:

This is probably windows network driver problem. I had exactly same problem. Reinstall network driver. If this still happens after reinstall, try to install older version of driver.