Doing the Dirty Work
As soon as the weather turned hot, our cable modem service, which is hosted by Earthlink on Time Warner Cable lines, became intermittent. I troubleshot it the best I could and narrowed it down to either the cable modem or the outside line. We had a Time Warner tech come out last week, and the guy did a good job of improving the inside connections as well as discovering that the cable box was bad. (A common malady, he said, and the reason why the “movies for sale” channel has never worked). When he left, the service was up; but he told us that if the service dropped out again, the problem was in the line to the house. However, he left us no paperwork showing what he had done and said that telling Time Warner what he had said would be enough.
It wasn’t.
The service is out today. Again! I talked to a customer service rep who scheduled another tech to come out (our third in two weeks—the first missed his time slot by half an hour and us because we had other things to do) but stated flat out he couldn’t schedule up work to have the cable replaced. In other words, he’s sending another tech out to repeat the work the first one did and write the work order the first one needed to have. How long before our cable modem service is back to normal? Watching this process convinces me it will be a few weeks, creating a big enough vacuum where a switch to DSL would become a real possibility. My wife and I both work from home, her more than me anymore, so high-speed Internet access is more than just a convenience.
I went out in the backyard and traced the outside cable. It ran under grass along one edge of the house until it dove underground near our air conditioning unit. Its curvature suggested it was headed alone one side of our fence toward power poles behind, which meant that if that wire needed to be replaced, Time Warner would have to come in and dig up my backyard. I really wasn’t in favor of that. Could I find another solution?
Going back into the house, I used dial-up to connect to the Internet and did a Google search for “cable modem booster”. I found an article that listed four signal amplifiers that worked with cable modems. One of them was a Motorola Broadband Drop Amplifier (Model No 484095-001-00) that Circuit City stocked and had a rebate on, and a store is only about 5 miles or so from me. So, I drove to the store, bought one, and brought it back.
The cable line in our house goes through a splitter at the junction into the house and just after its routed through a ground. One leg of the splitter (incorrectly labeled “Road Runner”) connects to our main entertainment center in the living room, and the other connects to the main line that goes up into the attic. The attic line then hits another two-leg splitter that hosts the modem on one leg and a line leading to a three-way splitter that supports TV’s in the kitchen and two bedrooms. I installed the signal booster just before the first splitter on the attic line, thereby boosting the signal to everything in the house except the TV in the main entertainment center. The TV’s in the three rooms showed a very noticeable improvement. However, I haven’t been able to yet judge the affect on the cable modem since service had come back on its own just before I started the signal booster’s installation. My wife thought the speed had improved, but speed tests at Road Runner show we’re getting average speeds and not as fast as I had seen in the past. That might be due to the connection at the main line to the signal booster. As I had been tightening the connection, the connector broke; and I installed a Radio Shack connector to restore service. I’m going to ask the technician who comes out Saturday to replace it; but if adding the signal booster has solved the problem, I’m not going to allow them to do anything else. I’m not going to let them dig up by backyard until things get worse.
I’ll know later today whether the signal booster compensated enough to stop the dropouts. They seem to be temperature related, and we’re supposed to have almost record high’s during the day. Here’s hoping that Motorola’s accessory does the job.
It wasn’t.
The service is out today. Again! I talked to a customer service rep who scheduled another tech to come out (our third in two weeks—the first missed his time slot by half an hour and us because we had other things to do) but stated flat out he couldn’t schedule up work to have the cable replaced. In other words, he’s sending another tech out to repeat the work the first one did and write the work order the first one needed to have. How long before our cable modem service is back to normal? Watching this process convinces me it will be a few weeks, creating a big enough vacuum where a switch to DSL would become a real possibility. My wife and I both work from home, her more than me anymore, so high-speed Internet access is more than just a convenience.
I went out in the backyard and traced the outside cable. It ran under grass along one edge of the house until it dove underground near our air conditioning unit. Its curvature suggested it was headed alone one side of our fence toward power poles behind, which meant that if that wire needed to be replaced, Time Warner would have to come in and dig up my backyard. I really wasn’t in favor of that. Could I find another solution?
Going back into the house, I used dial-up to connect to the Internet and did a Google search for “cable modem booster”. I found an article that listed four signal amplifiers that worked with cable modems. One of them was a Motorola Broadband Drop Amplifier (Model No 484095-001-00) that Circuit City stocked and had a rebate on, and a store is only about 5 miles or so from me. So, I drove to the store, bought one, and brought it back.
The cable line in our house goes through a splitter at the junction into the house and just after its routed through a ground. One leg of the splitter (incorrectly labeled “Road Runner”) connects to our main entertainment center in the living room, and the other connects to the main line that goes up into the attic. The attic line then hits another two-leg splitter that hosts the modem on one leg and a line leading to a three-way splitter that supports TV’s in the kitchen and two bedrooms. I installed the signal booster just before the first splitter on the attic line, thereby boosting the signal to everything in the house except the TV in the main entertainment center. The TV’s in the three rooms showed a very noticeable improvement. However, I haven’t been able to yet judge the affect on the cable modem since service had come back on its own just before I started the signal booster’s installation. My wife thought the speed had improved, but speed tests at Road Runner show we’re getting average speeds and not as fast as I had seen in the past. That might be due to the connection at the main line to the signal booster. As I had been tightening the connection, the connector broke; and I installed a Radio Shack connector to restore service. I’m going to ask the technician who comes out Saturday to replace it; but if adding the signal booster has solved the problem, I’m not going to allow them to do anything else. I’m not going to let them dig up by backyard until things get worse.
I’ll know later today whether the signal booster compensated enough to stop the dropouts. They seem to be temperature related, and we’re supposed to have almost record high’s during the day. Here’s hoping that Motorola’s accessory does the job.
posted by Andy Foster at
4:52 AM
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