Cable Modem problems... someone help, please...

I'm not sure if I'm typing in the right thread-place thing... if should be moved, it shall, I appreciate any help from anyone in this community...

I have a question about my cable ISP, and how it has been very unstable lately... it'd go on and off for short enough to be only a few seconds, but long enough to cause great lag and failures in network connections (anyone play socom II? well that "Networking error" also occurs, and [damn] my brother could have some serious game rage)

I called customer service / tech support and it may have been an defective splitter or splitter has gone too old and is bad now (since we have tons of them in the house). However if it was, then how come we are able to connect at rather more nondominant times of the day (5:00am-6:00am) contrary to the dominant times during the day (5:00pm - 12:00am)?
(In other words, I can connect at times when no-one is on, but it wouldnt work all that well when everyone is on)
Can it be perhaps the cable company isn't sending us enough signal?

any suggestions to how to fix the problem, or find the real reason behind this? I've thought of a wireless relocation idea... to make the router collect the main cable, then let the signal be transfered to multiple locations around the house and in this way discover if the signal is really weak, or it really is a splitter problem.


either that or just switch to DSL =], any help will be appreciated, thx - next2cheeze.

If there is a problem, either everyone from that ISP has the problem and they fix it from their headquaters, or in this case just you have a problem, so they should come to your house and fix it. Even if you have to pay aren't they supposed to come and fix any problems that you have. Just call them back and yell at them to come and fix your problem or just switch ISP's. I do not have a solution which you could use, and I wouldn't try that wireless thing because it will probably be the same deal, unless you were already thinking about going wireless. Anyways, I hope that you get it all sorted out. Good luck

Your backbone access to the Internet is shared when you are using a cable modem. Meaning that multiple users are on the same node. You are probably experiencing network congestion during peak hours due the the high number of users on at the same time. It is also possible that someone on your network has manipulated their modem to use more bandwidth than they have been allocated. In which case you will need to continue to report the slow connection speeds to your ISP so that they can more closely monitor that node for misuse.

good luck.

It sounds like a "contention" problem to me. that is too many people sharing the same resource, or someone on your node being greedy.

I guess that the only thing you can do is complain to your ISP and get them to monitor your link for abuse? If they won't do this, change your provider.

Good luck

I also started to experience a problem like this on or about 11/7/03 with my cable connection.
I am a heavy on-line gamer and was not having any problems before. I learned that my cable company did an upgrade on 11/6/03 and then left for the weekend. I got online on 11/7 to kick some butt (MOHAA) and noticed that all my pings to the servers had doubled. I thought this was odd but sometimes the initial search pings are higher than in the actual game so I ignored it. After joining the same I always join, I noticed my pings were all over the place (65, 120, 90, 250, 80, 300) making the game unplayable no matter what time of the day. I have never had this problem in the last year of playing on the same server. Every one elses ping in the game were fine (not bouncing). I also discovered a virus on my computer (Trojan Qhosts) to make things worse. Norton cleaned this up but I am still having the ping bounce problem as of today. I contacted my cable company and proceded to tell them what I have said here. They told me the upgrade was to boost upload/download capacity. I told them it did not work for me. they did not seem to care and sent me to second tier support. Still no help. Said they would look further into it.
The next day I got a message on my anwering machine from the cable company stating something to the effect that "for every 1MB my modem is downloads, it tries to upload 2MB.
There seems to be nothing wrong with our system so at this time we are refering you to your hardware manufacture." I may have accepted this but I have three different computers with different OS's that run this game and they all had the same problem. Regular net surfing is not a problem. Just the gaming part is killing me. I use a motorola surfboard cable modem, netgear firewall/router/switch. I even plugged my system directly into the modem and still had the same problem. Is there anything I can look for that would be the problem on my side of the cable wire? Is it possible I still have remnants of Qhosts? None of my other PC's had it.

thanks for your addvise.

It seems like everyone is having problems with their cable access lately. Atleast from what i have heard. And the dropouts here seem to happen regardless of if its peak time or not. Complain to your provider is the best advice you can get.

PeacE
-BoB

Hey deathtouch, try using a different cable modem instead of the surfboard. I didn't see anywhere where you mentioned trying a different modem. If you don't have a spare, then you can buy one from best bur for $30. That might be worth trying.

It could also be the cable splitters. We have Cable at our house and without notice the cable company switched something and our old splitters did not work. Our Digital Cable and Internet would just not work. We called them and they suggested that we change the cable splitters (which were old) and we did that and everything worked again.... It was quite weird...

When you say cable splitter do you mean those little things that split one cable into two connections? If so, I had my house built and did not do any of the cabling. It is only 1 year old but I will look and see if I can find any of those splitters. Thanks.

Quote:

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Originally posted here by DeathTouch
When you say cable splitter do you mean those little things that split one cable into two connections? If so, I had my house built and did not do any of the cabling. It is only 1 year old but I will look and see if I can find any of those splitters. Thanks.

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Yes, the device that splits it into two cables.

I tried everything to fix this problem on my end but no luck. Last night the problem seemed to disapear. Go figure. Ping did not bounce more than +- 5. Thanks for your suggestions.