distance between cable socket and modem

10 meters of coax OR ethernet won't affect your speed at all.

In general, you're far better off making that run with ethernet cable verus co-ax. Leave the modem near the jack where teh installer tested and verified signal levels and cabled it with a cable they made from the proper grade of co-ax.

From there, run any ole standard ethernet cable to wherever you'd like to place your router.

You might get away with adding 10m of off the shelf cable to your modem drop, then again you might put yourself on the ragged edge of upstream gain, cause a lot of packet loss and generally make your life hell. Make the run in ethernet, and you're far less likely to have trouble.

Best Regards,

10 meters of ethernet isn't going to trouble anyone, it's true in almost all cases.

However, I'm afraid this is simply not true for all cases with co-ax.

You can degrade the cable modem upstream path in a hurry with the wrong grade of cable, poor connectors or both in addition to the loss on 30 additional feet of marginal co-ax cable. Or in my case given the length of my outdoor drop, another 30 feet would make things simply not work here.

Best Regards,

Anyone _can_ have a bad experience, of course, but I think you're being unduly pessimistic. The first problem with your suggestion of putting the cablemodem at the wall-socket is that whilst seated at the computer you then can't see the indicator lights -- which are, after all, put on the device for a reason. In a perfect world, the cablemodem wouldn't have those lights but ...

I live on the fourth floor of a seven-storey building. The cable service comes from under the street into the basement and is then distributed throughout the building. In my living room is the jack -- 'where the installer tested and verified signal levels' ??? HA! You must be joking.

In any event, I have a five-metre cable running from the jack to the first television (and the first splitter), then another five-metre coax to the second television (and splitter) and finally a third five-metre coax to the cablemodem, on the shelf above my primary computer and next to the router.

Everything works fine! Once in a rare while the 'net goes down, but that's when the ISP has issues at the head end. And when that occurs, the lights on the cablemodem tell me that it's lost sync, without me having to scratch my head, get up and go out to the wall-socket to wonder what's going on.

To the OP: with a decent quality cable, a run of 10 metre coax will in all likelihood pose no problem at all. There will (probably*) be no 'loss of bandwidth'.

( * I obviously can't make you any promises. As I said at the beginning, there is always a small chance -- I'd put it at 1-2% -- that it won't work the way you want, for whatever reason. But, hey, that's a reasonable level of 'risk', eh? And if you get unlucky, the solution is simple enough: _then_ you put the cablemodem at the wall-socket and run a 10-metre Cat.6 ethernet cable to your router.)

cheers,

Henry

You've got one of the worst installations I've heard of in quite awhile. I'm not surprised that your service goes down occasionally. If your modem allows it, log in with a web browser and check your signal levels. I wonder if they are at the ragged edge because of all those splitters.

Try the web browser approach. You might find it more convenient.

Not joking. I have 4 installs of experience since starting with cable modem in 98. All 4 times, the installer verified signal/noise downstream signal strength and upstream required gain at the inside jack where the modem was to be installed. These numbers can vary by

3-9 dB just inside one home, and bad cable or connectors can create issues that aren't directly measurable as well.

And half of those, I've been lucky enough to have issues with drop length and signal quality with two separate cable modem providers, company owned new modems in two of 4 separate single-family residences in suburban Chicagoland.

No doubt indicator lights are a nice to have, and if you can get your modem near your computer, great. If you want to run cable once and be confident it's quite unlikely to change things, you run ethernet. If the install happens to be on the edge of a good signal one tends to care a lot more about 15% packet loss than seeing winky blinks. If the net goes down, a walk over to the TV is generally what you have to do anyway to compare modem carrier to what if anything has changed with the catv signal. :-)

Count yourself rather lucky that you put your signal through 2 conventional (non-directional coupler) splitters with things still working without a hitch. You must have excellent signal in your building.

My point is simply that adding 30 feet of unspecified quality co-ax cable with possibly consumer-installed terminators to a cable modem run is not nearly as foolproof as plugging in a 30 foot ethernet cable.

Best Regards,

You must have missed the part where I said everything is fine! When the service goes down, two or three times a year, it is due to external factors, not my cabling.

cheers,

Henry

Interesting. Here you go to the ISP's office and they give you the cablemodem, after scanning the MAC address. By the time you get home they have programmed their system to recognise that device at your residence so when you connect everything together and turn it on, it syncs up and away you go. It just works. For those people who can't hook it up themselves, they will send a tech but it costs an arm and a leg.

Reminds me of 10 years ago when I had ISDN. The newsgroups were full of guys lamenting the grief they were having getting their SPIDs configured, etc. Here, I never heard of anyone having trouble with that.

cheers,

Henry

Nah, I didn't miss it. It was in the same paragraph where you said your service goes down periodically. You blamed it on the head end or cabling, but it's more likely that the problem is in your house. It doesn't seem likely that the cable company expected you to run your Internet signal through 3 splitters.

Check your signal levels and see where they fall in the acceptable range. Check them again (or at least check the modem log) when the service is out so you have a basis for comparison. On the other hand, if losing sync now and then is "fine", then carry on.

I'm not trying to be mean or rude, but it sounds like you may have done a self install. That would explain the 3 splitters in series. I'm glad it works as well as it does.