Third party modem worth it?

C

CZory91

n00b
Joined
Mar 13, 2013
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Edit1:
This post has changed from an opinion question to a troubleshooting one. See original post down below edits.

Received the Motorola SB6141. The issues seem to be happening less, however I still have them. The disconnects seem to fix them self quicker. That is one definite change I've noticed.
Here are my modem stats, unsure if there is more I should be posting to this, please let me know.
http://imgur.com/a/9SohY#0

Here's another disconnect.
http://imgur.com/0oKgt9F


Edit2:
Well this is interesting. My power level just changed. It used to run in the negatives, 7-11ish. Now it's running -2 to 0.

This was after a disconnect, and me checking levels and the log, of which shows this, from latest to earliest:

Improper Configuration File CVC Format
TLV-11 - unrecognized OID
MIMO Event MIMO: Stored MIMO
No Ranging Response received - T3 time-out
Cable Modem Reboot due to T4 timeout
Unicast Maintenance Ranging attempted - No response - Retries exhausted
Ranging Request Retries exhausted

What could this have been? Nothing else has changed in the signal area. I copied everything including the address settings this time. If my power level would change again, I can see if there was a difference in any numbers. Maybe they actually did something? Or is this false hope.


Original post:
Hi, I currently have been having problems with my internet (have been for awhile, never really thought of replacing the modem). My internet will randomly decide not to work for a minute or so, and then return to a working state. Sitting on an expensive Asus RT-N66U, I don't think that's the problem.

Right now I have a Scientific Atlantica from about 4 years ago. Unsure of the model, but this is pretty much what it looks like:
http://www.amazon.com/computers-accessories/dp/B002V41X2M

Although this could very well be my ISP just being lame with their connectivity, I may swap providers and would want to have something I can take with me to rule out that as a problem source.

Been looking at a Moto Surfboard SB6141
http://www.amazon.com/Arris-Motorol...qid=1371628471&sr=8-2&keywords=motorola+modem

I suppose I'm just looking for a confirmation of "yes, this could possibly fix your problem", or at least rule my modem out. I don't mind spending the money (so long as it's not a 100% waste). I had contacted my ISP and they said they do accept third party modem use.
 
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ADSL was the biggest piece of shit internet because of the drop outs. I used different modems and it did not help. You may think it helps until it happens again. Cable solved all that crap + it is 10x faster. If you have that as an option I would go for it.
 
How's the signal strength in the house? I've fought with my ISP for years that the signal strength was horrible. They told be that it was the lines and nothing could have been done... turns out, it was a bad amplifier. Once replaced, never had a disconnect again. And this is after they reran all new coax throughout the home, replaced coax connectors, etc...
 
can you get your modem stats for us to look at? it's likely a splitter and/or shitty coax somewhere in your home. your modem stats will give a good indication of what's going on.
 
tacos4me said:
can you get your modem stats for us to look at? it's likely a splitter and/or shitty coax somewhere in your home. your modem stats will give a good indication of what's going on.
Click to expand...

I have no idea how to go about this, I went ahead and ordered the modem so I could have it before next week. Will update on results later on, and will provide stats if problem persists.
 
when my cable provider upgraded service I kept having issues related to having a DOCSIS 2.0 modem when they switched to 3.0

SD had one for like $30 a day or two ago... Also yes the new modem completely fixed my dropouts
 
Some ISP:s are stupid - meaning they will do campaigns to double your internet speed periodically even if your signal to noise level wouldn't support the said speed. This can and has lead to total loss of connection when the moden can't even succesfully handshake with the backbone. Has happened to me personally on more than one occasion.

So as a first thing, talk to your ISP techie and have him check your signal to noise ratios and line damping and do they correspond to the rated speed you're supposed to have. In my case I had to drop my adsl speed from 32Mb/s to 16 just because my location was too far away from the nearest dslam.
 
Hi again, reporting back. The issues seem to be happening less, however I still have them. The disconnects seem to fix them self quicker. That is one definite change I've noticed.

tacos4me said:
can you get your modem stats for us to look at? it's likely a splitter and/or shitty coax somewhere in your home. your modem stats will give a good indication of what's going on.
Click to expand...

http://imgur.com/a/9SohY#0
I believe these are what you mean? I have the three uploaded as separate pictures in an album per page. The red curve is where my disconnect happens. I assume the 1970 dates are placeholders as the modem is rebooting during this time and isn't connected enough to know the date?
 
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CZory91 said:
Hi again, reporting back. The issues seem to be happening less, however I still have them. The disconnects seem to fix them self quicker. That is one definite change I've noticed.



http://imgur.com/a/9SohY#0
I believe these are what you mean? I have the three uploaded as separate pictures in an album per page. The red curve is where my disconnect happens. I assume the 1970 dates are placeholders as the modem is rebooting during this time and isn't connected enough to know the date?
Click to expand...

yes that's the info i was talking about. i'm not the foremost expert mind you, but it seems to me that your stats aren't that bad at all.

downstream 'power level' is ideally as close to 0 as possible. however your SNR (signal to noise) is right where it should be.. 30 to 40 is considering very good. upstream looks okay to me as well.. below 50dB on the power level, and it should be fine.. but it is a little high. COULD be the problem.

do these change at all during the day? i'd watch them to be sure you don't have wind/rain/etc effecting them during these 'outages' you are having. do you know the layout of your home wiring? ie are you using any splitters/amplifiers you are aware of? usually t3/t4 errors would be a signal quality issue.

EDIT: also, yeah.. wouldn't worry about the date haha
 
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tacos4me said:
yes that's the info i was talking about. i'm not the foremost expert mind you, but it seems to me that your stats aren't that bad at all.

downstream 'power level' is ideally as close to 0 as possible. however your SNR (signal to noise) is right where it should be.. 30 to 40 is considering very good. upstream looks okay to me as well.. below 50dB on the power level, and it should be fine.. but it is a little high. COULD be the problem.

do these change at all during the day? i'd watch them to be sure you don't have wind/rain/etc effecting them during these 'outages' you are having. do you know the layout of your home wiring? ie are you using any splitters/amplifiers you are aware of? usually t3/t4 errors would be a signal quality issue.

EDIT: also, yeah.. wouldn't worry about the date haha
Click to expand...

I did a bit of googling myself about the stats and noticed there wasn't much of issue here, yes. I will try to see if these numbers change much during day/night, but I don't recall weather being anything out of the ordinary for any of my small disconnects. The log warnings, criticals, and errors I'm confused about at this point. As for my house layout, I have no clue. I will see if i can get any other information and report back. Would tech support from my ISP know any of these things or be able to find out? I'm hesitant to call them up because I know the usual ring-around would happen. I'd like to find out as much information for myself so I can have them come over and hopefully fix a problem instead of "well I see nothing wrong here, let us know next time" and have that go on infinitely.
 
CZory91 said:
I did a bit of googling myself about the stats and noticed there wasn't much of issue here, yes. I will try to see if these numbers change much during day/night, but I don't recall weather being anything out of the ordinary for any of my small disconnects. The log warnings, criticals, and errors I'm confused about at this point. As for my house layout, I have no clue. I will see if i can get any other information and report back. Would tech support from my ISP know any of these things or be able to find out? I'm hesitant to call them up because I know the usual ring-around would happen. I'd like to find out as much information for myself so I can have them come over and hopefully fix a problem instead of "well I see nothing wrong here, let us know next time" and have that go on infinitely.
Click to expand...

who is your isp, out of curiosity? i'd def call them, there's no reason for your internet to be shoddy. although they'll likely give you the run around as you said, if they schedule a work order and it doesn't come out of your pocket, you may as well. you're paying for the service!

i would wager it's a internal wiring issue in your home though. your modem may be behind more than one splitter, which is never a good thing.
 
It's local'ish. Blue Ridge Communications. Honestly their internet and service is great for the most part. It's just these drop outs. If it is a wiring issue, that sounds like something that is expensive/hard to fix. Is it? Also if it is a wire issue, why is it only having spikes of problems instead of overall service issues? I have zero problems with my internet otherwise.
 
nah, not too expensive at all. probably less than the cost of that new modem. but there may not even be an issue if your signal levels are stable. have you seen any changes yet at this point? if not i'd call your isp and get them involved. your levels really aren't too shabby at all, def not bad enough that you get disconnects all the time.
 
tacos4me said:
nah, not too expensive at all. probably less than the cost of that new modem. but there may not even be an issue if your signal levels are stable. have you seen any changes yet at this point? if not i'd call your isp and get them involved. your levels really aren't too shabby at all, def not bad enough that you get disconnects all the time.
Click to expand...

Nothing much different at this point. Going to wait until I am disconnected again and check out the stats during that period.
 
tacos4me said:
nah, not too expensive at all. probably less than the cost of that new modem. but there may not even be an issue if your signal levels are stable. have you seen any changes yet at this point? if not i'd call your isp and get them involved. your levels really aren't too shabby at all, def not bad enough that you get disconnects all the time.
Click to expand...

Here's another disconnect.
http://imgur.com/0oKgt9F

Nothing really changed when I checked the signals after I got disconnected. Numbers were relatively the same. What could that mean?
 
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means you should give your isp a call. they'll have a better idea of what's happening to your modem, and why.

read here for an idea of what's happening during these T3/T4 error periods.

basically, your line appears to be stable, but for whatever reason (this is what they'll hopefully be able to tell you) when your modem goes for a range request (range requests adjust power levels) it receives no response after increasing power levels, eventually times out, and resets your modem.

this could be due to line noise, bandwidth contention, activity on the upstream channel, an issue on their end.. anything really.
 
Well, I ended up calling my ISP and talking to them. I'd have to pay for someone to come out and check things on my end. Other than that, I had to wait until another disconnect happened to call them back and see if there was anything to be done. Of course upon being disconnected, I called back with them being just as useless with information as the first call. Here's the beginning to a wonderful run-around it seems.
 
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Out of curiosity, what does it cost to replace an amplifier? Can someone give me more details on this, how to do it, where to get one, etc? There are no splitters behind my modem. So the only other option on my end to do would be something with the amplifier, correct?
 
i had problems with t4/t3 timeouts before and it always ends up being a problem with the line somewhere in the neighborhood
 
By the sounds of it, it's going to be a major, major problem to get anyone to fix. Are there any silver bullets to getting internet providers to actually fix these sort of things if that is the case?
 
Are there any silver bullets in getting the companies to actually do something about the connection drops if it's on their end? I really wouldn't imagine anything else on my end being wrong.
 
Check if your ISP has a facebook page, then post your problem on it. Once it becomes public to world wide media source they will break their a$$ to help.
 
Are you sure it's your modem? I suppose it's worth trying another, but keep in mind that if you have issues and you don't have the standard modem it will make the troubleshooting process more painful as they might tell you they think it's your modem. Not too familiar with how cable works but with DSL there is certain parameters for the modem to train with the DSLAM properly as it's a dedicated connection unlike cable and works differently. Sometimes they may even have to change settings or move you to a different DSLAM.
 
Red Squirrel said:
Are you sure it's your modem? I suppose it's worth trying another, but keep in mind that if you have issues and you don't have the standard modem it will make the troubleshooting process more painful as they might tell you they think it's your modem. Not too familiar with how cable works but with DSL there is certain parameters for the modem to train with the DSLAM properly as it's a dedicated connection unlike cable and works differently. Sometimes they may even have to change settings or move you to a different DSLAM.
Click to expand...

It's definitely not the modem as I've had the problem with the previous one; Same thing but it took a longer to reconnect/reboot. This one at least reconnects/reboots itself in under a minute. The other one usually took 3-5. I would have to call my neighbor (double house, his end has the cable coming in) for him to reboot it all the time so I didn't get dropped from a dota2 game or something of the sort.I would like to say that it's a possibility its the new modem, but I've had this issue for 2 years with 3 routers (their cheap linksys they give you, then I moved to a dlink DIR-655 router, and now my Asus RT-N66U. Now I have gone from my cheap Scientific Atlantica to my SB6141.

Thinking about it, there isn't anything inherently bad or wrong about running a 100ft ethernet cable, correct? Feel kind of dumb not asking that to begin with, but then again I still am getting the ranging request errors on my modem directly corresponding with my disconnects, so I wouldn't see why that matters either.

This is the cable of which I got from radioshack, can't seem to find a legitimate "new" version of the item to show:
http://www.ebay.ca/itm/Gigaware-100-Ft-Cat5e-Network-Cable-278-834-/110861291532

I feel like I'm going to end up just calling a tech out here, paying them, not getting anything done, and then giving up on the issue; Unless something changes after they leave.
 
I think 300' is the max to stay within spec, so you are fine. Though I would try it with a shorter cable just to say that you did. If tech support asks and realizes you have such a long cable they might try to blame that.
 
correct the max length within spec is usually figured at 330ft so you should be well within spec there.
 
Well this is interesting. My power level just changed. It used to run in the negatives, 7-11. Now it's running -2 to 0.

This was after a disconnect, and me checking levels and the log, of which shows this, from latest to earliest:

Improper Configuration File CVC Format
TLV-11 - unrecognized OID
MIMO Event MIMO: Stored MIMO
No Ranging Response received - T3 time-out
Cable Modem Reboot due to T4 timeout
Unicast Maintenance Ranging attempted - No response - Retries exhausted
Ranging Request Retries exhausted


What could this have been? Nothing else has changed in the signal area. I copied everything including the address settings this time. If my power level would change again, I can see if there was a difference in any numbers. Maybe they actually did something? Or is this false hope.

Edit: Also, opinions on cat6 or 7 cable instead of 5e? I'm aware there will be no speed difference, but maybe better shielding in the cat6 and higher cables considering they use different methods on how the cable is made? Was reading into it a little bit and some people were saying cat7 may run into grounding issues because of how much was changed, or something like that? *shrug*
 
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