US Telco Support > AT&T > AT&T Southwest > Elite speeds continue to drop over past week,

reply to lustacular

Re: Elite speeds continue to drop over past week,

Sorry about that. Lack of sleep.

It seems to be just the router. I waited for it to go down a few times and resetting the router while leaving the modem on brought the connection back.

Today I've been back to 3+ Mbps with the connection disappearing only two or three times.

Also, when I began trying to figure out what is going on, I went into the router and changed all the security parameters on the off chance someone had broken into it and was hogging my connection via WiFi access. Didn't help.

With the Elite plan, you should be showing speeds of about 5mbps. For instance, my Pro plan (3 mbps) shows 2.57 mpbs from the Austin Speedtest site.

I see nothing wrong with your line.

The 5260 modem is easily capable of the 6 mbps speeds.

So, you've either got a modem that's on its last legs or a router that's acting up.

Since the 5260 doesn't have stats, it's impossible to determine what it thinks is going on. It might be best to replace the modem with a new one. That might fix the problem and, at the least, you can then see what the modem thinks is happening.

Thanks for the replies and the help. Sorry I didn't get back to this sooner.

I suppose I should contact AT&T for a new modem? Or buy something online? Any idea if AT&T is going to charge me for it or not, or if what unit they're currently sending out to customers is decent?

One last thing I don't think I mentioned before: This trouble began very soon after we were offered Uverse by AT&T. At first I was excited but after looking into it, I didn't want to risk experiencing the install woes and other problems a lot of people seemed to be having, and I didn't want to make a leap of faith with an entirely proprietary service that would have my internet, television and phone all on it. So I declined, but was then offered the Elite DSL plan (which had previously been unavailable in my area). Very soon after having turned down Uverse and upgraded to Elite is when I began noticing these problems, especially how the connection won't support any load at all around 6:30am. Part of me wondered if the DSL network of AT&T hadn't been moved to second class and now has bugs that are going unfixed, or just a lack of available bandwidth now that the push is on Uverse. *shrugs*

Seriously though, thanks for the help so far.

The modem that AT&T sells online is $49. You won't find one much cheaper than that.

reply to lustacular

Update:

I'd like to say thanks to NormanS as well as everyone else who posted. I purchased a new in bow SpeedStream 4100 on eBay, installed it, and replaced the "made for gamers", silicone jacketed cable between the jack and the modem with the cable supplied by SBC in the box with the modem. It's been running solid at just over 5mbps for the past four days now.

I have no idea if it'll still drop if a load is put on it at 6:30am though, as my hours have been different this past week and I simply haven't been awake to test it. SpeedTest.net's speed test, as well as others I've tried, still continue to kill the connection when they try to run the upload speed test. I have no idea why this is happening still. But the constant random disconnects and the slow speed are completely gone, and I'm happy. So I'd like to say a big thank you to everyone who offered suggestions and advice.

Funny side note: It was only about 48 hours after I got everything hooked up and running that the San Antonio area experienced the authentication error and no one could connect. I remembered similar instances from the past but since I had just set up the new modem, I of course called tech support thinking I had done something wrong, or something was horribly wrong with my line and was killing my DSL modems... So I called support and got a good tier 1 guy. Asked him if there was anything showing on his end for problems with the network in my area and he said no. Walked me through a lot of the basics, but then transferred me to tier 2 when we couldn't log into the modem directly for some reason. As soon as I got to tier 2, Cliff(?) told me they had just gotten the notice that there was an authentication issue for the entire area. Actually made me very happy.

You're welcome.