Would line length cause a Cable Modem to be slow and unstable?

InorganicMatter

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The run is out to an apartment off the main house. I ran close to 200 feet of cable to the house. The cable modem kept dropping the connection. I put a booster at the start of the run, and now the connection is stable but only runs at 400kbps. I get over 5mbps in the house. Would a 200 foot run cause that much line loss and reduction of speed?
 
Have you ran a cable tester to test the continuity of the ethernet run you made from the house to the apartment area? My best guess would be a short in the cable somewhere along the line or possibly a small enough cut to let it work but let it gather enough interference to drop some signal.
 
is that 200 feet of your common indoor cord you would plug a phone into? cause those are subject to interference and the longer the cord the more loss you can get.

you can get that hardcore think black insulated stuff that leads to your box (prob in your bacement our outside your house. but at this point for all i know you are already using it.
 
Well as far as nominal length goes....you should be good for ~350 feet before running into any huge signal losses due to JUST length. One thing to also look at, does the cable run near any unshielded cables? Flourescent lights? Stuff like that can put out enough EM to weaken the signal a little bit.
 
ditch that booster its only making it worce cable modems dont work with them since it can fuckup the upstream

post signel levels

and 200' is a bit far imo put the modem in the house and run cat5 to a router in your room
 
InorganicMatter said:
The run is out to an apartment off the main house. I ran close to 200 feet of cable to the house. The cable modem kept dropping the connection. I put a booster at the start of the run, and now the connection is stable but only runs at 400kbps. I get over 5mbps in the house. Would a 200 foot run cause that much line loss and reduction of speed?

First, Is the booster bi-directional? That's one thing you need to check right off the bat. Either get rid of it all together or call the cable company and see if they have any that they'd recommend.

Second, was the cable shielded or unshielded?

As the above poster mentioned though - you may be better off running some shielded outdoor-grade CAT5E to the apartment and keep the cable modem in your house.
 
The number of splitters on the line between the cables company's box and your modem can also cause signal degradation.
 
also the quality of cabling you're using and also how well you terminated the cable may affect the speed
 
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