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I've been having nothing but problems out of Time Warner Cable. I'm just about ready to switch to ADSL. I'm hoping someone here may have some experience with this and could offer advice on what to try next.

In July, my internet started dieing on a regular basis. It would die for 5-10 minutes at a time. Resetting the modem and router would take care of it. It got worse and worse, and would happen almost hourly.

They came out 5 times.

  1. They came out and replaced the modem. That didn't fix it.

  2. Tech came and tested the line, told me the line between the house and pole needed replaced, but didn't have enough with him, and would be back next week.

  3. Different tech comes out to replace the line between the house and pole. He tests it with a box and tells me the signal is fine, and that it doesn't need replaced, and to please not call again because it would count bad against his numbers. He also stole my car keys. I had to file a police report. Left my car keys laying on my desk, and when I went to go to work, they were gone. Searched everywhere.

  4. It keeps doing the same thing as before, so I call again, and tell them to please send someone else this time. Tech comes out, tests the line again, and tells me again, that the line between the house and pole is just fine, and he isn't sure what the deal is. Tells me he thinks its my router. Also tells me the previous tech has a history of thievery, and I am far from the first customer to complain about the previous tech stealing things.

  5. I call TWC and throw a fit, and tell them to send someone the out NOW to replace the line between the house and the pole. Tech comes out and replaces it. This guy actually seems to know what he's talking about. He tells me that the coax he's replacing is in pretty bad shape, the insulation looks worn out, and it was reading -7db, and that -4 db is the max they'll let it go to before they replace it, so the previous techs were wrong about it being bad. He also replaces it with extra thick cable they usually save for +250 foot runs. This seems to fix the majority of the problems.

However, still 2-3 times a day it just dies. To fix it, I have to unplug and plug back in the modem, then log into my router, release the WAN DHCP address, and then renew the WAN DHCP address.

I've tried plugging the modem directly into multiple computers such as my Win 7 box, a linux box, and my Asus router. I've tried multiple routers (Linksys, and the Asus I have now). It always does the same exact thing. When I call in and talk to a tech, they always try to blame the router and not their equipment.

I finally talked to a level 3 tech last night, and he told me he believes me, and that they have a special system for dealing with this stuff, but to get in on this special system where they send out super experienced techs, I have to have 3 other techs come within the same month.

Anyone had something like this happen before? I don't want to deal with 4 techs again in the same month. Any ideas of what the heck it could be?

When I spoke with the level 3 tech last night, he told me that his logs didn't show my cable modem losing connection with their servers at all in the last week. Which is total BS, since last Wednesday it was down all morning. The cable light was off on the modem, and it wouldn't let me pull a DHCP IP address from it. It was line this from 6am until 9 or 10am, and when I called in to talk to tech support, I got an automated message saying their was an outage in my area. So how are his logs showing my modem never lost sync, yet when I called in their automated phone system even told me that the connection was down. This tells me their log system isn't worth anything.

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  • Replace the cable from the house to the modem, use RG6, most likely the cable in the house is the old RG59.
    – Moab
    Sep 19, 2010 at 16:58
  • That has been replaced as well, I should have mentioned that. Its new cabling all the way from the pole. Its also literally right on the other side of the wall from the demark box.
    – Logan
    Sep 19, 2010 at 20:56

1 Answer 1

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I had the exact same problem with my virgin cable connection here in the UK. It turned out to be too much signal coming in to the house for my modem to cope with. I eventually got an engineer out who knew what he was doing and he put a 20db attenuator on the modem. This reduced the strength of the signal coming in to the modem and I haven't had any "local" issues since.

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  • When they finally replaced the line between the house and the pole, the tech told me it had a -7db signal to noise ratio, and then anything more than -4 wasn't acceptable, and -8 would cause it to quit working entirely. After replacing the line, it went to a -1. It also seemed to double my download speeds, which was very nice.
    – Logan
    Sep 19, 2010 at 7:20
  • don't forget to upvote useful answers and accept those that solve your problem. i'm not saying mine did here, just sayin' :) Dec 9, 2010 at 23:59

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