Cable modem problem?

I had the same problem with Cox cable. After a year of them trying and failing to fix it I decided the solution was to switch to DSL. I think the cable companies have too many services running on their cable. Good luck.

To their credit, Cox just came out this morning (yes, Sunday) and fixed my problem. Seems that my cable had been almost completely cut in half when an installer rammed the cover down on the cable box across the street. They fixed that and my signal levels are normal now (was too high up and too low down) and have not lost synch all day.

That sounds plain ignorant to me - just my opinion.

I too give Cox "some" credit. They sent out two techs, replaced my modem with two different brands, ran a dedicated cable for internet, and gave me a direct number to a tech who monitored my modem. They saw that every modem on my street was dropping out on a regular basis but they never were able to fix it. After more than a year of calling Cox and reporting problems I got the impression that they had quite trying to fix the problem.

So I gather my problem sounds like a weak signal problem?

I've been thinking if twcable can't fix this in a couple of visits, I would switch to verizon dsl. How do you like dsl?

For me DSL is great! It does not work for everybody because it depends on your local phone company and where you live. My DSL speeds are as good or better than the cable was on its best days. AT&T Yahoo as some great prices for the first year trial and equivalent to cable pricing for following years.

I don't think your modem has a login page to check power levels.

If your modem is an early non-DOCSIS 2.0 modem, I'd take it in for a swap to a later model.

Given a choice, get a late model Motorola Surfboard 5100 or 5120, Terayon TJ715X or similar - something that has a login diagnostic page you can access.

Swapping the modem is something you can do yourself, so you don't have to worry about waiting for a tech.

I would first get them to check your modem by calling tech support and have them access it while you're on the phone and see what they can tell. If they indicate you have some sort of problem, get them to agree to a modem swap and go down to your local office and get one of the above modems if possible. If your neighbrs are also having problems, it's more likely a line problem, but I'd still want a later model modem.

Either weak signal or lots of noise.

-Larry Jones

We don't ATTEND parties, we just CRASH 'em. -- Calvin

I agree. Only because John had some trouble with Cox, it does not mean that everybody will experience the same problem with their cable company. I for myself had also some trouble but it turned out to be a problem on my site. After tweaking my PC, I have now full speed again. Never had a more reliable Internet connection.

Martin

I was mostly referring to his "cable companies have too many services running on their cable" statement which just sounds like ignorance of communications hardware.

Still showing ignorance. It's not about too many services, it's about having enough bandwidth to add HDTV channels. Apples and oranges. You can't have "too many services running" (since everything has a unique bandwidth), you can have not enough room to add new channels though (not the same thing) forcing them to make compromises in the future.

Here's another way to look at it...

The cable is carrying RF signals at different frequencies, or to put it another way, a number of channels. Let's represent each channel with a glass.

Now let's say I have 100 glasses. And let's say I need 60 of those glasses for grape drink. (Pretend grape drink is TV channels.) And lets say I need

20 glasses for orange juice. (High speed Internet.) And another 20 glasses for ice tea. (Digital phone service.) I have enough glasses to offer each of the services. Not only is each group of glasses a discrete group; each glass is discrete of the others. What I do with the grape drink has no effect on the orange juice glasses, or the ice tea glasses. In fact, what I do with one grape drink glass has no effect on the other 59 grape drink glasses.

The problem that the cable companies have is that they have only 100 glasses, but they want to be able to offer stuff that needs 150 glasses to offer. If they want to offer more grape drink, if the 60 glasses they have for grape drink are full, they're out of luck. It's not a matter of mixing grape drink into the orange juice and ice tea. That won't work at all. The fact that your orange juice tastes funny is a result of something wrong with the orange juice, not a matter of grape juice contaminating some of the orange juice.

So if they're offering the beverage in the first place, it means they already have enough glasses to offer that beverage. If the quality of the beverages are poor, it's not because of a problem with any of the other beverages.

Getting this back to the real issue, the problem they're having is they don't have enough channels to use to offer everything they want to offer. If they're already offering it, there is a channel that "it" is using. Poor quality on one channel is not a matter of them trying to use other channels for other purposes.

In case people were curious, my problem turned out to be a malfunctioning modem. The tech guy was sure it was a signal problem and spent some time recrimping and connecting cables to no avail before caving to my pleas to try replacing the modem. So FWIW, when it comes to cable modems, the lights can be on with no one home.