Contributor
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24 Messages
Intermittent Connection To The Internet
I keep getting an intermittent drop of my Internet connection. I have a Motorola MB7621 cable modem that I own. My cable box with a two-way splitter for TV and Internet was installed by Comcast and is up to date with good quality equipment. This drop happens quite frequently and lasts sometimes just ten to twenty seconds and other times up to five minutes. Sometimes my modem even appears to reset.
Here are images of the current upstream and downstream channel conditions. I rebooted my cable modem twenty minutes ago.
I've had some interaction with Xfinity community support specialists on Reddit. They said they have checked the signal from the Xfinity end and everything looks good. Please help me resolve this. It is frequent enough to be a serious impediment to my Internet usage.
I'm the only one using this connection in the house. I stream YoutubeTV and Youtube for most of my use. Also I check e-mail and browse the web. My plan is 200 Mbps and I get better than that according to speedtest. It may be that the neighborhood shared coax connection may be getting overloaded. That's just a guess, but the buffer underrun and Internet disconnect seems to get worse in the evenings when people get home from work.
EG
Expert
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108.3K Messages
2 years ago
The upstream power is too high and it is even out of spec on channel 6. And it may be intermittently fluctuating even farther out of spec. And there is too large of a difference between the lowest and the highest power level. That can cause random disconnects, spontaneous re-booting of the modem, speed, packet loss, latency problems, and the un-bonding of channels.
You may need a tech out to investigate this one but here are some things that you can try.
In an effort to try to obtain better connectivity / more wiggle room, check to see if there are there any excess/unneeded coax cable splitters in the line leading to the modem that can be eliminated/re-configured. Any splitters that remain should be high quality and cable rated for 5-1000 MHz, bi-directional, and no gold colored garbage from Home Depot, Target, Wal-Mart, etc. Splitters should be swapped with known to be good / new ones to test.
Also check the coax cable for any damage such as cuts, nicks, abrasions, kinks, sharp bends, etc.
If there aren't any unneeded splitters that can be eliminated and if your coax wiring setup can't be reconfigured so that there is a single two-way splitter connected directly off of the drop from the street / pole with one port feeding the modem and the other port feeding the rest of the house/equipment with additional splits as needed and you've checked all the wiring and fittings for integrity and tightness and refresh them by taking them apart then check for and clean off any corrosion / oxidation on the center wire and put them back together again, then perhaps it's best to book a tech visit to investigate and correct.
Good luck with it !
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pwatbg
Contributor
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24 Messages
2 years ago
Thanks for the excellent feedback. I believe cabling may be the problem as you point out. I have a Comcast-installed two-way splitter at the drop. One output goes to my cable modem. The other output used to go to my X1 set-top-box. A few months back, I canceled my Comcast TV package and switched to streaming Youtube TV. I returned the X1 STB, which left a disconnected coax cable attached to one of the outputs of the splitter. As a test, I've hooked up my old Motorola SB6121 cable modem, without powering it up, to this cable as a simple line terminator for impedance matching. This appears to fix the problem. If it does, I could leave it like this or eliminate the splitter. Here are the new results from the Motorola MB7621 cable modem with this test fix in place:
(edited)
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