US Cable Support > W.O.W. > Intermittent disconnects (Central Ohio)

Intermittent disconnects (Central Ohio)

Your signal looks great. The drops are good actually, ideally you want to be close to 0. What seems odd is how much the signal is different on different channels, but I guess they are not that far a part to matter much. Your SNR is damn near perfect. I would try rebooting the router and modem and see what happens. I get random times of high pings and poor performance, but rarely do I get actual dropouts like that.

Edit: you don't 0 on upstream. Your upstream power looks good too. You want between 35-50 ideally. 55 or higher you generally will have issues.

I rebooted my router (it's a PC,) modem, and 16-port gigabit switch i bought at the end of last year, problems still exist, tried leaving them all off overnight and problem still exists. I tried running continuous pings between my main PC and all the other interfaces on the network (Printer, TV, NICs in each PC) just to see if something was dropping out through the switch and nothing dropped until it reached outside my LAN.

reply to td854
tried flushing your dns cache then pointing to opendns or google dns?

Should I be doing that on my router or all my PCs? I use 3 PCs at once at this desk and they all DC at the same time.

You can either configure your router to use a new DNS, then flush it on the PCs, or manually override your tcp/ip configuration on each PC one-by-one and flush.

Ok I've set it, we'll see what happens.

reply to td854
set up a smoke ping here on this site, and look at the graphs.

Running that now. Have had 2 disconnects in the last 45 minutes after not having any since around noon. This is like the worst time to have these as I run servers for my buddies and I.

»/r3/smokeping.···331cec93

Well there it is, disconnecting a lot tonight as well. had at least 5-10 disconnects just this evening.

Anyone have a suggestion as to what I should do at this point? Should I just place a service call with WOW? Every night repeated disconnects and apparently we're getting a lot of pixelation on certain channels as well (I don't watch TV) but if the signals are good as someone mentioned, I don't get it.

If you're using one of their modems, then yes, place a call for a truck roll.

If you're using your own modem, you really should rent one of theirs for a short period of time. They can't really troubleshoot unless it's their cable modem.

I'm using one of their modems, and it was literally brand new when I got it, I was the first user. I suppose it's possible that its gone bad but that would be some pretty poor luck.

You'd think, but I have my own story here.

This happened a few years ago. I had EXTREMELY slow upload speeds. Techs all validated my complaint.

Over the course of several visits and several weeks, they were unable to fix this. They cycled THREE cable modems through, and rewired everything back from the cable modem all the way to main lines running back to the fiber point. Still nothing.

I'm not sure how this happened, but finally one of the techs who showed up got together with someone on the phone who had a brainstorm: just re-flash the cable modem from the head end.

BAM! done. ????? You mean, no one had ever done that in all of this? And ALL THREE of their replacement modems all had the same problematic firmware and behaved THE EXACT SAME WAY?

I was watching Big Bang Theory tonight, and here's Chuck Lorre's vanity card from this episode:

"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." --Mark Twain

Well I just had an interesting experience this evening. A friend of mine who i don't normally voice chat with logged into my ventrilo server. He's in Ohio but not with WOW and during talking to him, everything disconnected but he did not disconnect from me and we were still talking. I disconnected from a Teamspeak server in Dallas, a game server on the west coast, and another friend of mine connected to my Ventrilo in PA disconnected from me. This leads me to believe that the connection issue is in some intermittent faulty regional router somewhere. I had a similar problem with insight as I'd only disconnect from things in specific regions of the country and it took them almost a year and a half to fix it. I may try to find some servers I can ping all at once and see which ones drop when I disconnect, it may help to track down the general area.

reply to td854
You stated you rebooted your router, but you did not mention bypassing it. Can you try bypassing the router and test a computer directly on the modem and see if it has problems? Routers are easily the most common sources of problems I've run into.

Just ran a 50 foot ethernet cable directly from the modem to my PC for about 20 hours and have disconnected 7 or 8 times. I was at the PC the whole time chatting with a friend of mine, same thing happened, friend in ohio stayed connected to me, every server or person I was connected to or was connected to me outside of the state DC'd.

I sent an e-mail to technical support, a very long and technical e-mail describing each step and process I took to root out any problems that could be on my end. What did I receive? A response almost 4 days later that tells me to delete my temporary internet files and restart my PC. Really guys? Really?

My next suggested step would be to replace the modem. You can either have a technician come out and replace it, or just swap it out yourself at a local office if that's more convenient.

I understand you're trying to help, but from a technical standpoint how would an issue with the modem hardware produce the phenomenon associated with my previous statement; summarized: connections to objects in my state (Ohio) stay connected when all other connections out of state disconnect. Not to mention the modem is less than a year old, I am the first user of it, and I keep it well ventilated. While I realize even if it were in the realm of possibility in my mind that faulty modem hardware could cause this issue, it is extremely unlikely that this modem would be defective in the first place.

I apologize if I'm coming off as arrogant but I've been down a similar road before with Insight Communications and it just ended in a years worth of modem swaps, wasted time and money on my part and Insight's part and it ended up being a problem with a junction somewhere in the southern United States associated with the company that provides Insight with service. Since the problem is completely oblivious to the average internet user it is more likely than not that it wouldn't be reported. Heck, I haven't even called to report a problem because talking to the WOW people on the phone is difficult as I end up having to educate them. Same with the techs, when I got this Arris modem/router installed I had to show him how to make it pass-through because he didn't know how, and I had never even used that particular brand of modem or interface.