Mediacom → Re: [GA] My Cable Service

I do not want to be one of those guys that hover, but so far from what they have told me, they have added/subtracted an amplifier twice, added an equalizer and other than that. The guy comes over and says, "yep there is a problem. I'll have to have them check the street." End of story and never hear back from them except to contact Chad again and say my service still doesn't work.

Oldcableguy. You joke about that fix it yourself comment, but I honestly have thought about it. If I wouldn't get arrested for tampering with their equipment, I would start tracing this back to whatever is causing the issue myself and tell them they can take my pay and apply it to the bill.

Is there one channel that you are having the worst problem on? Get some number specific information out of a tech that is there.
DBmV on a specific freq? (Make sure it is a digital channel you are having difficulty with)
MER of that channel?
Pre BER of that channel?
Post BER of that channel?
This information will tell you alot!!!
If they can not read this information (old meters) they are going to find anything wrong.
Let us know what you find out!
I wish I could fly down there and get it fixed for you!!

It sounds like noise ingress into the line, which an older meter is not going to detect, MCCShawn's suggestions are correct we need a QAM meter that can actually decode the QAM frames and determine what is wrong. If I had to guess the signal is probably fine (if adding an amp didn't help) but the SNR is probably too low due to the noise ingress. The bad news is that can take a long time to solve because they basically have to work backward from your home to the cable plant to find where the ingress is.

I wish you good luck but there is a lot more to a CATV HFC network than an ethernet network.