Internet keeps going down

[stevech]

Here's my signal levels.. enclosure. My downstream is quite high because I have a bi-directional amplifier to feed the things in the house.
My ISP is TimeWarner Cable (TWC)> They are not at the state of the art in DOCSIS (cable modems), but I do have 50Mbps down and 5Mbps up per speedtest.net/best server, long average.
My upstream would be faster if TWC would let all upstream channels run at 64QAM. Maybe they don't have a good enough cable plant to do so. The upstream RF is at about 30MHz and there's lots of noise ingressing the cable in that band. The downstream is about 600MHz as I recall.

If your upstream gets into the 50's, there's a problem. It can change due to intermittent high noise levels on the cable system, bad connectors in your home, rain wetting the cables, etc. These modems go to a max of about 55 on the upstream. Sustained, that goes to a problem log at the cable co. Mine did so one time due to a faulty upstream amp. TWC came and put an upstream block on my coax. So I lost the phone, internet, set top box for TV (the SDV channels). TWC person who did that left no notice, did not call, did not make a note in TWC's computer system for the help desk, etc. Grrr. Two day outage.

I have a separate modem for my digital phone on TWC. That way, if I'm dorking with the LAN and cable modem, it won't affect the phone. This is a WAF priority.

TWC's promised 100Mbps down service, long delayed, might not happen until they find a buyer for themselves. Not happy about that.

Cable Co's have a problem with increasing upstream speeds... too fast, and there'll be more file/web servers. So long as they don't port-block as does AT&T with the POS U-Verse.

 

[sfx2000]

Cox is getting ready to roll out a shed-load of changes here in San Diego county..

They changed peering over the summer over to Comcast's backbone from TWC and L3 - and for about a week period, things were pretty bad - had to escalate that one way up, well past Tier1/2/3 customer care and an engineer in our market and I had some good debug sessions together to sort that.

Over the past year, they've done a big push to get DOCSIS 2 and earlier modems off the network - I don't actually believe they'll provision a DOCSIS 2.0 device like the SB5120 any more...

Sometime in Q4-2015/Q1-2016 they're planning the shift over to Switched Digital Video and turn off ClearQAM and analog (yeah, Cox is still supporting analog transmissions, so no STB/converter needed at present for old-school NTSC only sets) - that means a lot of STB's in the house...

And I'm sure they'll sunset the legacy digital telephone and convert everyone to VoIP - I'm still on legacy..

Cox still hasn't given a timeline for IPv6, last update was "soon", and they do port blocking for SMTP/HTTP, along with a fair amount of image optimization (sometimes too much, and you'll get really bad images in webpages)...

I'm sure we'll all see improvements in bandwidth for broadband (both Cox and TWC) when ATT launches their Gigablast product here in San Diego.

 

[stevech]

TWC has lots of channels we watch a lot on switched digital video (SDV). Your set top box has its own upstream RF, like the cable modem. SDV for us has had many problems ("please try later"), due to inadequate capacity at the SDV nodes. Oh well, what do you want for $185/mo.

AT&T's U-verse, in most neighboorhoods, is still ye ole copper pair from residence to V-RAD curbside box. Where I live, that distance is fairly short (in-spec, say, 1000 ft.) as the crow flies. And that's what AT&T's unethical marketing sells. But reality, here and in many places with underground utilities, the as-built distance is 3x or more. So most of the time it just doesn't work. Especially when it rains and water gets into the underground and pedestal.

What is AT&T's "gigablast" going to do about ye ole 4KHz-intent copper wire? They built the V-RADs curbside to avoid the impractical capital costs to pull fiber into the tract house streets. A very few have easements to conduits with spare room for future fiber pulls. But in general, the cable TV coax, with 1-2GHz of raw bandwidth, is just so advantageous without trenching a million miles and all the regulatory/permit issues that go with such.

Wireless cellular is not in the game for such capacity.

Sorry, I'm not an AT&T admirer since they were acquired by a baby Bell who then renamed themselves AT&T. (note AT&T wireless is a different legal entity).

 

[sfx2000]

Uggh, so that's what we have to look forward to with SDV - cox does some now with their OnDemand, but that's always been painful... part of that is the horrible STB UI and like you mentioned "Please Try Later..."

Gah...

Gigabit Broadband (and others like Google Fiber/VZ FIOS) does change the market dynamics, and the CableCO's have responded by turning up the knob on DOCSIS 3/3,1 - right now they don't have much incentive to do so, hence why you and I pay a small baby's ransom for 50Mbit downlink and perhaps 5Mbit uplink...

 

[Riekopo]

When my internet went down a few days ago I copied these ipconfig files.

 

[Riekopo]

It went down a couple hours ago and I copied the router system log.

 

[stevech]

It went down a couple hours ago and I copied the router system log.

Tell us if, when internet access is out,
Is it out for PCs connected to the router by cat5 ethernet?
Are the lights on the cable modem different than when there's no outage?
What are the cable modem signal levels as discussed above, and viewed (likely) at 192.168.100.1.

 

[Riekopo]

Tell us if, when internet access is out,
Is it out for PCs connected to the router by cat5 ethernet?
Are the lights on the cable modem different than when there's no outage?
What are the cable modem signal levels as discussed above, and viewed (likely) at 192.168.100.1.

There is no PC directly connected to the router via Ethernet. My computer is connected to the router through two powerline adapters which are using Cat6a cables. It just went down for a minute and the lights on the modem and router look exactly the same. I can't seem to get to the modem status web page when it goes down.

 

[stevech]

Please connect a PC, laptop by wire to the router. That allows us to eliminate WiFi.

Modem lights normal.
Can't get to modem status when Internet access is down.

After you connect by wire to the router, we can complete the diagnosis of Router vs. IP on power line.

 

[Riekopo]

Please connect a PC, laptop by wire to the router. That allows us to eliminate WiFi.

Modem lights normal.
Can't get to modem status when Internet access is down.

After you connect by wire to the router, we can complete the diagnosis of Router vs. IP on power line.

My computer isn't hooked up via WiFi so I'm not sure why you want me to eliminate it. Hooking up my computer directly to the router via Ethernet is going to be hard to do. What do you want me to do next if I manage to do that?