I'm currently in about week 4 of intermittent problems. My connection goes from working great to absolutely horrid in the blink of an eye and the issue persists for several hours at a time.
I've tried to troubleshoot on my own until there was nothing I could come up with. I arranged for a tech to come out on memorial day (after 1 week of slight problems and then another week of severe problems) and the tech that came out was a subcontractor - said he couldn't read the levels and swapped out my modem. He checked at the box at my house and at the pole - even had a supervisor come out later in the day to check it again. Service seemed good for a day or two but started crapping out on me again. I actually tried to contact the same tech/subcontractor as they suggested but they never returned my call.
I notified Cox via email and finally got a response a couple days later saying they could schedule somebody for Sunday June 2nd.
June 2nd a Cox technician arrives and I explain the situation. He checks the power levels and says the last guy was a moron and he would never have left them where they were. He proceeds to check the line from the pole and the line from the box to the cable modem. He suspects the issue is with the line from the pole to my house as it was rubbing along the top of my roof and the cable was frayed. He wanted to replace the coax from the box to my modem as well since it was hidden behind some boards and he couldn't make a visual inspection of it. He replaced both cables along with a second tech that showed up. Oh yes - no fees were explained but they want to charge me $50 for the visit. I barely had service installed in January - and I've had couple hour outages before this too.
Service seemed decent since then except for bad latency certain times of the day. Playing games online almost seems impossible most of the day as the latency jumps from 40ms to 500ms without warning and I get connection drops. Here's some info and test results:
Smokeping (ongoing 2 week interval)
http://www.dslreports.com/r3/smokeping.cgi?target=network.a1b1fa36a89053e50886926a1d457397
Line quality test from a few minutes ago:
http://www.dslreports.com/pingtest/63c47aa4c85a/3047107
Model: Cisco DPQ3212
Vendor: Cisco
Hardware Revision: 1.0
Serial Number:
MAC Address:
Bootloader Revision: 2.3.0_R1
Current Software Revision: d3200-P15-5-v302r125552-120524a-COX
Firmware Name: d3200-P15-5-v302r125552-120524a-COX.bin
Firmware Build Time: Jun 1 09:58:12 2012
Cable Modem Status: Operational
Wireless Network:
Cable Modem State
DOCSIS Downstream Scanning: Completed
DOCSIS Ranging: Completed
DOCSIS DHCP: Completed
DOCSIS TFTP: Completed
DOCSIS Data Reg Complete: Completed
DOCSIS Privacy: Enabled
Downstream Channels
Power Level: Signal to Noise Ratio:
Channel 1: -3.5 dBmV 39.1 dB
Channel 2: -3.3 dBmV 39.1 dB
Channel 3: -3.5 dBmV 38.9 dB
Channel 4: -3.8 dBmV 39.0 dB
Channel 5: -3.4 dBmV 39.3 dB
Channel 6: -3.7 dBmV 38.5 dB
Channel 7: -4.0 dBmV 38.3 dB
Channel 8: -4.1 dBmV 38.4 dB
Upstream Channels
Power Level:
Channel 1: 39.0 dBmV
Channel 2: 36.2 dBmV
Channel 3: 38.7 dBmV
Channel 4: 0.0 dBmV
I'm using a ZyXEL ZyWALL USG 50 VPN router for a site to site connection to my work and as my router (I telecommute). Mainly I use it for a voip phone and my laptop to occasionally access network shares and the voip phone application. Very light usage. I have a desktop I use for productivity apps that doesn't connect through the VPN - mainly using Outlook and some websites for data entry. Bandwidth usage is minimal.
I'm paying for Premier internet and phone (no TV) - phone is affected also when this problem crops up. There are no splitters - I have a drop from the pole to the house and from there to my modem. There's maybe 20 feet from the box on the side of the house to the modem if that with no breaks or extra connections. No surge protectors either.
I sit next to the cable modem / router and everything is wired in with short cat5e cabling. I do have a Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH in access point mode for wireless devices in the house connected to the ZyXEL router.
It's possible the issue is related to my hardware but I can't figure it out if it is. I haven't done a lot of testing with just the cable modem connected directly as it screws up my VPN when the IP address changes (it'll change if I connect directly usually). It's frustrating having an intermittent problem as I'm doing nothing different on my end but all of a sudden it'll completely slow down to a crawl - yesterday it seemed ok during the day mostly but today for the past 90 minutes I've had less than 1Mbit downloads.
My typical speeds are 60-65 down / 20-25 up. Of course right this instant I get this:
http://www.speedtest.net/result/2766638301.png
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