Migrating cable issues.

April 14, 2008 8:08 PM

Internet connection in one room works fine for several months, then slowly quits. Moving to another room starts the cycle again. We're using a cable modem. Do I have to rewire my house?

We've suspected since moving in a few years ago that the cable in our house is, shall we say, less than high quality. Clues are cable box crankiness (with more than one box), horrid performance when using a splitter, etc. Most recently, we've noticed the degrading internet connection. We've replaced both the modem and the router with no luck. We've even tried *cringe* Monster cables, with a bit of temporary improvement. Eventually we are going to run out of rooms to move the modem to.

Is there a fix for this that doesn't involve ripping out the wiring and starting from scratch? And if we *do* have to rewire, what should we to do to keep this from happening again?

posted by CrazyGabby to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Do you ever reboot your modem aside from when you move it to another room? Have you tried unplugging it from the cable, waiting a minute, then plugging it back in to the same spot? How is the connection then? Your assumption as to what's is temporarily "fixing" the problem sounds rather far-fetched; wires just do not behave that way.
posted by bizwank at 9:55 PM on April 14, 2008

Cable modems and routers need to be "cold started" periodically. Why this is I can not imagine, but I have been told this by numerous technical support reps. Once a week unplug the power to your cable modem and router, count to 15 then restart them.
posted by swarkentien at 9:55 PM on April 14, 2008

The cables in your house aren't snaking in from a half-dozen different places, right? They're splitting off of one connection somewhere. Sounds like that's where you (or the cable company) needs to look.

I was in a similar situation once and it was a splitter installed by the cable company outside of where I lived that caused the issue. I had a (cable company installed) splitter inside too, but they put another one in the juction box that was just one splitter too many.
posted by Cyrano at 10:43 PM on April 14, 2008

Most cable companies will fix this kind of stuff for you for free (Comcast does for us). If they won't then put in all new high quality splitters, resplice all the cable ends etc. You don't need new wires, just perhaps new connections. A somewhat simpler thing to try first is a spritz of tuner cleaner on each connection. DeoxIT D5 (now available from RadioShack) is by far better than most other brands. Also, try scraping the oxides off of the copper center conductor at each connection. Also, put the cable modem, which is quite sensitive to a poor connection, close to where the cable enters the dwelling, without a lot of splitters etc. in the path. If you look your particular modem up on the internets you can probably find out how to access the utility menu which will show you things like signal strength etc.
posted by caddis at 11:34 PM on April 14, 2008

Sorry this is so long, but I thought it might help at least in the troubleshooting department. Also it illustrates how unhelpful the cable companies can be at times. caddis made it sound rather easy but as you'll see that's not always the case.

I had a nightmare of a situation with Mediacom. My house cable worked fine, but the internet didn't. It would start out okay, then slow down, then do nothing. For the first few months it would take awhile to shut off. It gradually fell back so that eventually we were connected for only about two hours a day. The cable company came out dozens of times and had a number of different reasons why it wasn't working and it was always the same guy. First it was that I needed a new modem and naturally they didn't have any so I had to buy my own, then I had too many computers hooked up, then it was the location, then it was my "cheap" cable... the excuses seemed endless and this after he drilled a freaking HOLE in my wall, next to my front door from the outside (tacky, tacky, tacky) so he could stick a cable through it... and the stupid thing STILL didn't work.

I threw up my hands in frustration and told them to come out, get their cables, fix my wall and never come back to my house ever again. They tried to make amends and sent the same old jerk out here again to fix it one last time. He spent three hours trying to figure it out. He went into the attic, he went into the closets, he checked each TV. He should have done all of this to begin with.

He noticed that my living room cable wasn't hooked into the same cable that our bedrooms were hooked in. He told me that my "stealing cable" was part of the problem. I informed him that we bought this house with the cable installed like this and I'm PAYING for the converter that said Mediacom right on it, so clearly I wasn't stealing anything. Besides, Mediacom was aware that I had cable in the living room as when I called they knew exactly which rooms had cable.

We went outside to take a look. There were two Mediacom boxes on the end of my house. One was on the left hand side and the other was about 10 feet off to the right. He was messing around with the cables in the left box and I asked him what the other box was for. He shrugged saying, "That's not our box." I looked at him in utter disbelief! I then asked him why it said MEDIACOM engraved on the outside of the freaking box then. If you could have seen his face. His mouth dropped wide open and he turned pale. I'm sure that in his head he was reviewing all the insults and bad diagnoses that he had given me when the answer was right in front of him all along.

In the end (yes, it is a long story - sorry) the box on the right, that the oh-so-intelligent cable guy wasn't bothering to look at, had damaged cable from the street to the house. If he had actually opened his eyes for all those months he would've noticed it.

The good news: I got six months of free cable on so many blunders. :) Of course, I still have the good for nothing hole in the wall with the cable sticking through, but hey, I've got internet now so I'll get over it.

Anyway, point is, that even if your TV is working, it still could be an outdoor cable as well. Good luck and I hope yours can be pinpointed much faster than mine was.
posted by magnoliasouth at 12:26 AM on April 15, 2008

"Your assumption as to what's is temporarily "fixing" the problem sounds rather far-fetched; wires just do not behave that way."

That's what I thought too, although I know little to nothing about wiring. I did find some Google references to "cable degradation", but it was usually on sites saying "Buy our really expensive cables!"

We do reboot both the modem and router regularly, though. (That's the first step whenever the connection gets flaky, which it does at least once a week.)

Another possible clue - when we call Comcast, they say there is no outage in our area, they can see the modem, but there is a lot of signal noise. (Mr. Gabby just filled me in on that part.)
posted by CrazyGabby at 4:34 AM on April 15, 2008

Another possible clue - when we call Comcast, they say there is no outage in our area, they can see the modem, but there is a lot of signal noise.

When I was having similar cable modem issues (worked for a while, then suddenly stopped), that's what they told me (lots of signal noise). They sent someone out, and tracked the issue down to a bad splitter (splitting to tv and internet), and replaced it for free. So if you have any splitters at all, I'd look into that.
posted by inigo2 at 7:56 AM on April 15, 2008

The good news is that you have Comcast and they are rather helpful in fixing these problems. They will send someone out to check your connections and signal strength. We have had them several times. Once it was a bad connection up on the pole, once our splitter outside and recently a bad wire to an upstairs TV. In each instance the service people were friendly and knowledgeable (although the people on the phone were just plain dolts). You could probably track down these problems yourself, but when Comcast will do it for free, why bother?
posted by caddis at 9:15 AM on April 15, 2008