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VS
join:2003-07-27
| [TW] Columbus OH problems
Since the spring or early summer of 2007 I've had ongoing connection problems. They are intermittent and for a long time I was content to wait it out and see if it resolves itself because I've been an EL/TW subscriber since August of 2003 and I've never had any regular or persistent connection problems... until this year. I live near I-70 and Livingston ave... if there's anyone else living near me having the same problem or no problem at all it would be nice to hear about it I think.
I used to have a Linksys BEFCMU10 cable modem. I owned the modem and I knew from day one that TW was not going to be a pleasant experience. I called them to have it provisioned, they said they did, but I still could not connect. They scheduled a service tech to come out and diagnose the problem. The tech came out, looked at the modem info page, pulled out his cell phone, called someone, gave them the modem's MAC address and BAM it worked fine. They scheduled a tech to come out to my home and give them the same info I had already given them the other day... nice waste of company resources if you ask me and it delayed me getting broadband by 2 or 3 days. Everything was pretty much smooth sailing and fine after that. No problems, no blocked ports, occasional download speed increases (but never and upload increase) it was just about as awesome as it gets I think.
In early 2007 I got a new wireless router to support a laptop in my apartment. I started with a Netgear because it was given to me by someone who didn't need it anymore. After about 2 or 3 weeks of using it is when the connection problems started happening. I blamed the router at first... I didn't like the netgear's webadmin interface anyway so I got a Linksys WRT54G that I could load hyperwrt onto to replace it. The dropping connection problem seemed to lessen but it did not go away. After about a month I broke down and put my old Linksys wired router back in place of the new wireless... and the connection continued to drop so I knew it wasn't my router at that point.
I started searching these forums and found that there are some issues with the BEFCMU10's firmware... something I can't upgrade myself really. So I decided to blame these intermittent problems on the modem. Maybe it's overheating. It was stacked on top of my Linksys router after all. So since I OWNED this Linksys modem, I took it apart, cut a hole in the top and mounted and wired up a small 40mm fan over the biggest chip on the board... this was June 2007. It seemed to have no effect at all other than reducing the amount of heat I could feel between the router and the modem when they were stacked on top of each other. I also tried moving the modem to a lower shelf than the router to isolate the 2 piece of hardware - just in case there was some kind of electro-magnetic interference or something going on. That too had no effect.
My disconnect problem would come and go - I'd have no disconnects for a period of a month or more at a time and then it would return. After trying everything I could think of with my hardware I started keeping track of my disconnects and cross-referencing it with weather conditions. I couldn't find a consistently solid correlation with time of day or weather conditions.
In early November the disconnects got really bad again and I decided to finally call TW. They sent out a line tech. He looked at my cable modem signal info, looked at my wiring, my splitters, said everything looked fine. I asked him about getting a modem from them and he told me I could just go to the TW office and get one. Great! So after he left, I drove out to the nearest TW office to get a modem. I was told by the lady behind the Plexiglases shield that I couldn't just walk in and get one and that I'd have to schedule a tech to come out and INSTALL it. Fine... whatever... she let me use a phone in their office to call the sales department or something so I could get hooked up with a new modem. I was on hold for 30 to 45 minutes altogether using their phone in the office with a 4 digit number to call different departments. I was at their office for over an hour, most of it on the phone... listening to their on hold music. There's nothing like driving 20 minutes to spend an hour on the phone and then driving another 20 minutes home empty handed. Eventually I was set up and they said they'd send a guy out the next day to install the modem.
The guy came, gave me the modem, I hooked it up, he called it in to get it provisioned, everything seemed swell! After the tech left I did some speed tests and I couldn't believe my results! I was getting 6, almost 7 mbit downstream speeds! I had never seen more than 4 or 5 mbit with my old modem... I thought I had finally solved my problem... but I would be wrong.
In the past 2 months I've had 5 or 6 techs sent to my apartment. They all do the same thing. They look at the modem's info page, look at my splitters, see no problems, scratch their head and leave. Some of them have said they would check the box on the outside of the apartment building but I have no idea if they actually did or not. As far as I know I'm the only person in this building that has cable internet - the building doesn't have every unit filled (ever) and the only two people in my building that I know for sure have internet use dialup... and the disconnect problem NEVER correlates with cable TV problems whatsoever. I started monitoring and printing my modem's connection log and signal info page before and after disconnects at some point... no tech ever wanted to see those... wasted time, effort, ink and paper.
So about 2 weeks ago I stumbled onto a tidbit of info somewhere about Motorola cable modems rebooting or shutting down when they see an upstream power level of 55dbmv or higher. I started monitoring and making screencaps of my modem's signal info page every 30 seconds using an extra computer I don't use for much other than a local file server - I made my own local HTML page that iframes the modem's info page and refreshes it every 30 seconds. Sure enough, the last reading I'd get before a disconnect was 54 or 55 dbmv on the upstream. When I wasn't being disconnected the signal numbers were in the high 40s but they would vary all over the place at times... the more they varied the more likely it was that I'd be disconnected soon... obviously. There's a slim chance that by getting a modem that isn't Motorola my disconnects will disappear or lessen... I somehow doubt that when I call and ask TimeWarner to give me a list of every modem I can get from them (so I can do my own research on them) that I'll get much of a straight answer.
So on December 22nd I got another tech to come out. I told him the same thing I've told all the other techs that have been coming out. He didn't want to see the logs I had printed either but he seemed to get what I was saying. He told me (after looking at the cable that goes out of a 3-way splitter to the modem) that my problem could be caused by the stinger being too short - the wire inside the coax. Okay... I'm with him all the way there, that makes sense! He tried to cut my coax down and put a new connector on it but couldn't... so he went back out to his truck and gave me a new coax cable with connectors already on it. After that he had me refresh the modem signal info page and tell him what the numbers were - I wish I would have wrote down or screencapped those at the time but I didn't. He said he was going to get a tap from his truck and get rid of the TimeWarner 3-way splitter a previous tech had given me about a month ago.
http://www.arrisistore.com/product.php?pid=709811 - that 6db Tap is what he gave me and here's a diagram of how my cable is wired up now:
http://img292.imageshack.us/img292/3888/splitters20071222ol8.jpg
In that diagram the black box is the modem and the other grey box is a splitter that feeds a TV in the living room and a TV in the bedroom. Cable TV picture/signal is pretty much the same it's always been - no problems for the most part. This is pretty much the way I had my splitters set up since 2003 before a previous tech had given me a single 3-way splitter that had a better db rating (-3.5db I think) on one output for the modem. Granted the best splitter I had before TW's intervention was a 4db splitter and not a tap... and this last tech took the 3-way splitter with him when he left LOL.
Right... so after the 22nd I figure this probably won't work either... but I was trying to be positive and optimistic... going against the facts as I see them. About 2 hours after he left, my connection dropped. Several times. Usually not for more than 20 minutes at a time. I had other things to do anyway. This pattern continued just as it has in the past... random disconnects for random amounts of time. Friday, 12/28, 3:32 my connection drops. Last reading I got from modem info showed 54dbmv... I had other things to do. 12/28 about 6:30, still hasn't reconnected. 7:15, still hasn't reconnected so I call Time Warner. They said they'd send a tech out the next day... I was quite happy with this since the last time I called Time Warner to complain of a disconnect the lady I got forwarded me to RoadRunner support after I told her my story... oh that was a fun one. 9:30... still won't reconnect and I have nothing better to do so I figure I'll move my couch to get at the splitters where the cable comes in from the wall and put nice labels on the cables to show what each cable is connected to... that way the tech won't have to ask me or figure it out when he gets here. It's when I'm putting on my tape labels that I discover the main cable going into the tap from the wall isn't tight. So I tightened that up and BAM the modem reconnects. As much as it pained me, I called up TimeWarner to tell them to cancel the tech visit since I had found and fixed the problem this time. I know that when the tech gets here all he's going to do is look at my stuff, find no problem, scratch his head and leave anyway. I don't need the hassle unless I'm having a real problem I can't fix anyways.
Right... so after double checking the best tech's work my connection hasn't dropped for about 2 days. So the problem is solved, right? Nope. Not one bit. I'm still doing screencaps of my ever-refreshing modem signal info page. 47dbmv rock solid for about 70% of the time. Late Friday night I saw it hit 51 or 52dbmv. Late Saturday night I saw it hit 54dbmv. So... I think I'm probably still going to get disconnected at some point, but it should be MUCH LESS often now at least. Time Warner does not care that there's a problem that's NOT inside my apartment. They don't care that they had a happy customer without problems for almost 4 years.
Misery loves company and I'm not alone. I know a girl who lives near Youngstown Ohio and she has RoadRunner over TW lines. We BOTH have had these connection problems all throughout 2007. She got a new modem from them at some point this year and it hasn't helped... she has a SA Webstar now and from what I know from someone else I know over the internet he has a SA webstar and it will stay connected up to 58dbmv and maybe higher. I know both of them from playing Unreal Tournament online. We play often on servers located in Columbus Ohio. Thursday, 12/27, about 7pm, Gina and I both lost access to the servers in Columbus for HOURS!!!! 5 game servers, 2 teamspeak servers and 2 website servers, all hosted by the same company in the same building. I thought the servers were just down until I talked to the admin the next day and found out that Gina and I both had the same problem... as did a handful of other people who rent game servers from him. I asked him if they all had Time Warner lines or were all in Ohio but he didn't know.
Thanks for letting me vent... If this helps anyone else out then great. | |
VS
join:2003-07-27
| 
I didn't think it would get so bad again so soon. Was offline for several hours early this morning (the screenshot of my smokeping verifies that) and continues to be intermittent - I never see a reading above 55dbmv on the upstream from the modem so it's gotta be disconnecting when it hits 56dbmv and higher. Talked to Time Warner not more than 10 minutes ago (high call volume today apparently - I could wait on hold or have them call me back in a hour) and the lady on the phone said maybe I need a booster. Thursday is the soonest they can send someone out. | |
VS
join:2003-07-27
edit:
January 6th, @09:52AM
| So the guy came today. He said they can't put a booster in an apartment. I did some googling and I think maybe they meant a CMTS when they said 'booster' which is similar to a DSLAM which would totally fix the problem I think but doesn't go inside an apartment... would be at the pole or something similar.
So now I'm stuck with intermittent cable problems and no way to fix them. I can call and complain but there's no longer any point in having anyone come out to diagnose a problem that doesn't exist when they are here and can't be fixed from inside my apartment anyway.
I wonder if my regular pattern of latency is related to the disconnect problem even though the 2 aren't happening at the same time...
I should have mentioned before, but the modem is a Motorola SB4100 if anyone cares.
I found something that I think describes my problem fairly accurately in that when I do get disconnected my modem log (once it's connected again and I can access it) is often filled with ranging failures and can't reconnect:
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/109/max_number_cmts.html
***quote***
Another by product of excessive collisions are latency of recovery times for Cable Modems when contending for a small amount of ranging opportunities when a large number of Cable Modems are already transmitting data. The Cisco CMTS uses dynamic ranging to ensure modems will always get a chance to register, but the number of opportunities decreases as the load detected on the upstream increases to ensure we are granting the data requests.
If the upstream is excessively loaded with too many modems then it may take longer for modems to recover to online state which can impact customer satisfaction.
***snip***
Since simultaneously active subscribers are assumed to be 10% of total subscriber base, we end up with a number of around 1000 subscribers per line card. Cisco strongly recommends this number not be stretched beyond 1500 subscribers per line card, since service will be severely degraded during the busy hour. This could lead to disconnection, offline status, extremely erratic performance from the cable modem customer point of view, longer than average ranging time for modems attempting to re-register, as well as other system and performance anomalies.
***/quote***
1.06.2008 - the drops keep on...
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VS
join:2003-07-27
edit:
January 8th, @06:29PM
| My internet started dropping 1.08.08 around 1am. It was not able to reconnect and stay connected for more than one 30 minute (roughly) period in the 8 to 9 hours it was completely messed up. It was still out when the tech got here around 10:30am (from calling about another problem 2 days ago - not same day tech service) and he said the signal on the line looked fine... the 1st tech out of 6 or 7 now to actually use a line signal meter of some kind 
They gave me a new modem today and it connected just fine when the SB4100 wasn't able to 2 minutes before. Old = SB4100, New = SB5100. I've had a rock solid 44dbmv on the new modem all day so far. I got a new IP adress in the process and I had to start another smokeping :/ It's hard but I'm trying to be hopeful | |
ClassAction
join:2008-01-26
Powell, OH
| reply to VS
Finally! THANK YOU for confirming that I am not crazy! Your cable conditions mimic my cable problems almost exact. I applaud you for taking the time and energy to put your experience on paper.
Just yesterday I upgraded to the next fastest cable internet speed in hopes that this might in part solve the problem. FAT CHANCE! My signal still harbors between 35%- 40%. The surprise came when the customer service rep. told me that instead of paying 42.95 a month (for the slowest speed) I would now be paying 34.95. A savings of $8.00 a month for in theory faster service. Unbelievable!
Thanks again for | |
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