Sporadic Cable Modem Connection Drops Seemingly Caused By High Traffic

I have a 3 Com cable modem connected to a wireless D-Link router. Half the connection goes to a wireless USB NIC in another part of the house, but the primary connection is via Cat 5 to a computer 6 feet from the modem and router. I'm running Windows XP (no service packs) and have an Intel NIC on the main computer.

For the past couple of months I've been getting sporadic disconnects that appear to be the result of high up/down traffic. Often when downloading newsgroup headers, transferring large files via FTP or HTTP to web-hosts, or IM trading files I will get disconnected for about a minute. The cable modem indicators do not change, however, so I'm not losing synch (apparently.) I can not ping outside IPs like my DNS servers during this period, but usually after 2 or 3 consecutive pings I will re-establish connection (that's where I get the ~1 minute time frame.) This also can affect online gameplay if I have been playing for long periods of time.

I'm on Comcast Cable in the Orange County, California area so it could be discrete bandwidth capping, but I don't know.

Any tips on how to isolate a potential cause?

Reply to
offshore33
Loading thread data ...

Reply to
BigJim

Cabling-Design.com Forums website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.