Oh Give Me A Home, Where The Cable Modems Roam....

[morgandawn]

Fascinating experience in Internets connectivity.  The new Comcast router is dual band - 2.4 and 5Ghz. The reception for 2.4 is so bad - even when the computer is standing right next to the router, the speed is often less than 1mb per second with many disconnects. Most of our desktop and personal laptops do not have wireless cards that handle the newer 5Ghz range. So for a few days we had two cable modems  each in two separate  rooms (Comcast mailed us 2 routers by mistake so we put them to use) - one running on 2.4 and one on 5Ghz at different times  and then tested the equipment with Ethernet and off. That is how we determines what machines needed to be physically connected and which ones could handle wireless. Of course, we first tested with only one cable modem/router but when it became clear that would not work we hauled out the second modem for testing purposes.

Luckily, most of the living room devices can run on the 5Ghz and the signal to those on the 2.4ghz in the living room is ....OK.  The machines that can not “see’ the 2.4ghz in my office will be connected via Ethernet (the irony is that all of my personal machines fall into this “cannot connect via wireless to these new modem/routers”) So the single cable modem/router will be housed in my office again.

when all we had was DSL, the connection was even across the board at 2.4ghz no matter what machine, no matter how connected and no matter where located.   It is a very small and flat house and should not have been such a problem for the new router.

I had thought that perhaps we had interference with other devices in our neighborhood that were running 2.4ghz and did a lot of channel monitoring and switching. But in the end, it turns out to have been weak 2.4ghz signals on both routers (different models).

All of this - 3 days worth - just to get the household connected. Now we have to test the connection for speed and reliability over the next week.  This means the cables and boxes will remain everywhere and my online time will continue to be intermittent.

PS.  At one point, the network lost all security settings and would not allow us to re-secure it.  We had to reboot the router to get it restored.  We are not impressed with Comcast and are happy we got the month-to-month version.

PPS. And of course for the first day, we could not get any connection on any one of our 3 cable TV outlets. Our signal was just too weak with too “many” outlets. “We can send someone to diagnose and fix for $100 an hour.”  We knew we were in trouble when we stumped customer support when they asked me to unscrew the coaxial cable from both the modem and the wall and I said: “The coaxial cable cannot be unscrewed from the wall. It comes through the wall. It has come through the wall from the day it was first installed. This house was built in the 1950s. Ours is not a Plug and Play house. Also our refrigerators and our washing machines do not talk to Amazon. And they never will.”

Comments

[adair]

Yeah, Comcast is not helpful. I am keeping to my DSL until I have some other source of broadband; I use Comcast for cable only, Earthlink for DSL and At&T for my landline. All this may cost a bit more that joined services, but each one does what it does best for me. I think all these businesses jumped into internet connectivity without really working through the join-up issues. Local friends who use Comcast for net and cable tv have continuing problems and sometimes no real explanation about what is going on.

There's also a seeming opinion that everyone has the latest hardware, wants to watch video on every device, don't save anything and want everything updated all the time. It shows in internet service, and Apple is starting to pander to video watchers rather that information savers. My iPad lost the ability to save webpages when I added the latest update; there's a new one out now but the info says nothing about correcting that problem.

Good luck getting everything to cooperate; you are fortunate to be people who understand your equipment and software. I'm trying to talk Sharon D through establishing a backup and preparing to change her OS from Snow Leopard to whatever is current when she does it. It's going to be a steep learning curve for her.

[morgandawn]

We would have stayed with the DSL if the service had not gone out. we found out that we're the last house in the neighborhood that still has DSL and ATT is not putting much effort into fixing it.