Cable modem slowing down with use??

Nov 12, 2004 11 Replies
Cable modem slowing down with use?? open original image

After 2 stellar years of 3mb+ download speeds (with Charter Pipeline), as of yesterday, I've been stuck between 300k and 1.5mb download speed. All tests from Charter's office seem fine (according to them).



It seems as if my speed degrades after having the computer on for awhile. Nothing has changed in my configuration; I use a Linksys wireless router to share the connection with 2 other machines in the house, and a Voicepulse VoIP phone hooked up. These have been in place for a long time with no loss of speed (until yesterday).



Is it possible that the modem itself is defective? What could be causing such drastic changes in bandwidth so suddenly?



Thanks


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------------------------------------------- Chris Eilersen snipped-for-privacy@eilersens.com


Lots of new cable modem customers in your neighborhood. Welcome to the world of shared bandwidth. -Dave

You mentioned a wireless connection. Any chance one of your neighbors has discovered your network and is helping herself to a chunk of your bandwidth?

Thanks, but I'm absolutely clean of Spy/Adware. I run Spy Sweeper religiously and keep it current with all new definitions on an almost daily basis.

N> > After 2 stellar years of 3mb+ download speeds (with Charter Pipeline), > > as of

Could be - however, I have the same problem when connecting directly to the computer and bypassing the router.

Completely unplug your wireless access pont or somehow disable it. Like somebody seid before, I wonder if somebody discovered your wireless network and is using it.

Are you sure that's the relevant variable, or could it be the time of day? What happens if you reboot your computer? If you reboot (power cycle) the cable modem?

You say it seems as if your speed degrades after having the computer on for awhile. This is a classic symptom of lots of adware, spyware, and other piggybacking processes running in the background. If the CPU is too busy running these processes, it doesn't matter how much information is pouring into the NIC.

My recommendations would be to run two different spyware/adware programs. Reboot, and run them immediately again. If new spyware/adware is turning up immediately, without you doing anything else, you what spyware/adware is appearing will direct your next course of action. If you've been running spyware/adware detection programs all the while, make sure you have the latest updates.

Run a complete anti-virual scan, too. Let's be complete.

After you're sure everything is clean, reboot everything. Turn it all off, and disconnect the power from every device. Start over by powering-up the cablemodem first. Wait for it to sync-up, and then power-up the router. Wait for it to stabilize, and then power-up and start-up any computers or other devices attached to the router. (Make sure you reconfigure anything that needs to be set to something other than factory defaults as you go along.)

Have you tried the connection late at night or early in the morning? Is the slowdown correlated more with time of day or total time on the computer? A neighbor gaming or doing large d/l can slow you down.

Might any of these tools be helpful?

formatting link
I have Adelphia Cable and my speed dropped to 600-800 kbps for several months before returning to 3000. Even now, it drops to 1000-1200 at times. It's Adelphia and something I can't control.

Don

That's assuming your Sweeper knows of *ALL* spyware.

I'd run updated AdAware and Spybot also. My work colleague wasn't able to access a web page via cable access at all. I ran both AdAware and Spybot (without the updates) and found over 50 pieces of spyware which I deleted. That enabled me to update the pgms on the web and rerun (finding even more). Now she can browse.

I didn't believe that spyware could have that great an effect, but it apparently can shut one down.

Karen

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