One Splitter Too Many

For about the last month, our cable modem service has become somewhat spotty. It dropped out for a couple of hours on Friday afternoon and then again on Saturday morning. After recycling both my modem and my router several times, I called Time Warner Cable’s support line. The woman on the other end of the phone had me recycle the modem again while she waited on me—even though I told her I had done it twice already—and when that didn’t cure it, scheduled a repairman to come out Monday afternoon! Not wanting to go the whole weekend without service, I decided to see if there was something I could do to check out the household connections.

After the cable TV and Internet signal hits a connection box on the back of my house, it travels up via a single cable into the attic. Once there, it was split via a two-cable splitter into a line that ran the high-speed broadband into an outlet in the living room where the previous owners had a desk and PC. However, we had put a formal dining table there and set up the computers in a back bedroom that became my office. The line to my office was one of three connections mounted on a second splitter downstream of the first. Knowing that cable modems need to have only one splitter between the outside connection and the hook up, I simply swapped the line to my bedroom and the one to the kitchen. Voila! Problem solved.