KoolMoe
Aw Man
Premium
join:2001-02-14
Annapolis, MD
clubs:
 ·Verizon FIOS
 ·Speakeasy
| [Business] Connectivity, SMC 8014, and Cisco 5505
We recently got Comcast Business Service (phone, net, TV). They provided the SMC 8014 as the 'modem'. We have a Cisco 5505 for our firewall.
We were having horrible stability issues - dropped connections 2 to 3 times daily. It definitely seemed related to traffic as we have at least 10 active net connections during normal work hours. Connection stability didn't seem to be a problem at all on weekends (occasional VPN worked fine and connection worked fine Monday morning).
After 4 weeks of Comcast Support discussions, finally got up to Tier 3 where a fellow said it was likely the SMC (as we suspected) in that it did not handle heavy traffic well.
(Then WTF are you providing it as the modem for a business-class connection?!)
So they sent us the older SMC 8013WG which apparently handles traffic better but does cannot handle above 14mbps. I've no problem losing a couple mbps in trade for a stable connection!
Set that up and everything seemed fine...
Now, with both modems, when a laptop was connected directly to either, speeds were a solid 11mbps (8013WG) to 16mbps (8014). However, all machines behind our 5505 (which got it's WAN IP from the Comcast 'modem' were stuck at about 1mbps. I figured something was up with the Cisco, and briefly bypassing it with an old DLink confirmed that. However, I couldn't see how that was affecting the Comcast modem/connection stability.
So digging into the 5505 once the 8013WG was in place, it seemed all ports were set to 100mbps whereas the Comcast were likely (I couldn't find a way to confirm) 'auto'.
Changing the 5505 ports to 'auto' cleared up the slow issues and, BAM, super speed from one point to another.
Now I wonder if that hardcoded 100mbps setting on the Cisco 5505 did indeed cause enough disruption with the Comcast 8014 port that it caused the port to buckle, hence the daily drops...
Anyway, just wanted to report that in case it helped anyone else. At some point, I may put the 8014 back in place just to see if we'd still have drops now that the 5505 port settings match the 8014's (assumed), but not gonna really sweat it.
Hope that helps!
KM
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