internet connection issues. line issue? amp issue? something else?
so i've had problems with my internet for a few months. originally i was getting barely 2 Mbps downstream (with regular up stream for some reason), called cox and had someone come out. said it was a busted diode in the box on the outside of the house and it seemed to fix the issue for a time.
little over a month later and i'm getting intermittent internet issues again. looked around and found out how to see error messages from my modem, kept seeing a slew of them most commonly being (DS Partial Service Fallback: MDD Lost) (Lost MDD Timeout) (MDD Recovery following MDD Loss) in a chain, along with interspersed T3 an T4 timeouts which i think were often paired with the modem randomly resetting itself. this happened independent of internet activity, i saw logs from the middle of the night when nothing was going on.
called cox about this issue (specifically timed it during an instance where my internet was messed up so they'd actually see something), was told that they couldn't see the issue because they couldn't even see my modem, concluded my modem was bad and needed replacing. sounded sort of wrong, since i was on the internet at the time (even though it was slow) and it did randomly work perfectly fine; but i ended up replacing the modem since it was about 5 years old.
so i got the new modem yesterday, plugged it in and tried to activate it through the browser page that opens when you try to use a new modem without attaching it to the account yet. that didn't work so i called cox and spent at least an hour doing the same reset/restart/wait cycle over and over as the tech on the line failed multiple times to actually activate the modem. when i finally stopped getting the 'unactivated modem' page and could actually use the internet i found i was having the same slow internet speeds and the tech told me he couldn't see my modem... told me to call motorola and ask them for help...
so i looked more into my modem, noticed some odd things about the downloaded bonded channels page.
Channel | Lock Status | Modulation | Channel ID | Freq. (MHz) | Pwr (dBmV) | SNR (dB) | Corrected | Uncorrected |
1 | Locked | QAM256 | 33 | 345.0 | 8.2 | 40.5 | 214 | 281 |
2 | Locked | QAM256 | 1 | 783.0 | -12.6 | 0.0 | 226952 | 256410 |
3 | Locked | QAM256 | 2 | 789.0 | -12.6 | 0.0 | 291100 | 136131 |
4 | Locked | QAM256 | 3 | 795.0 | -12.6 | 0.0 | 63682 | 294326 |
5 | Locked | QAM256 | 4 | 801.0 | -12.7 | 0.0 | 62987 | 196473 |
6 | Locked | QAM256 | 5 | 807.0 | -12.7 | 0.0 | 256239 | 116841 |
7 | Locked | QAM256 | 6 | 813.0 | -12.7 | 0.0 | 272197 | 32595 |
8 | Locked | QAM256 | 7 | 819.0 | -12.8 | 0.0 | 0 | 0 |
9 | Locked | QAM256 | 8 | 825.0 | -15.1 | 0.0 | 0 | 0 |
10 | Locked | QAM256 | 17 | 879.0 | -17.0 | 0.0 | 0 | 0 |
11 | Locked | QAM256 | 18 | 885.0 | -16.9 | 0.0 | 0 | 0 |
12 | Locked | QAM256 | 19 | 891.0 | -14.4 | 0.0 | 0 | 0 |
13 | Locked | QAM256 | 20 | 897.0 | -15.4 | 0.0 | 0 | 0 |
14 | Locked | QAM256 | 21 | 903.0 | -19.2 | 0.0 | 0 | 0 |
15 | Locked | QAM256 | 22 | 909.0 | -18.6 | 0.0 | 0 | 0 |
16 | Locked | QAM256 | 23 | 915.0 | -15.9 | 0.0 | 0 | 0 |
17 | Not Locked | Unknown | 0 | 921.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0 | 0 |
18 | Locked | QAM256 | 34 | 351.0 | 6.4 | 41.7 | 308 | 518 |
19 | Locked | QAM256 | 35 | 357.0 | 7.1 | 41.8 | 252 | 402 |
20 | Locked | QAM256 | 36 | 363.0 | 6.8 | 41.9 | 245 | 345 |
21 | Locked | QAM256 | 37 | 369.0 | 5.4 | 41.7 | 211 | 250 |
22 | Locked | QAM256 | 38 | 375.0 | 4.9 | 41.6 | 266 | 253 |
23 | Locked | QAM256 | 39 | 381.0 | 6.4 | 41.2 | 239 | 192 |
24 | Locked | QAM256 | 40 | 387.0 | 5.6 | 37.7 | 243 | 264 |
Total | 1175135 | 1035281 |
this is what it is right now. and my internet speeds are actually pretty ok right now. i'm not sure what everything here means, but i've read that the pwr column should be within -+10 dBmV and that i should have more activity on the channels listed here. last night i had 7 channels with activity (i assume, because there were 0s in the corrected/uncorrected columns for the other 17 channels). i'm guessing this is bad, but again i'm not well read on a lot of this.
so back to my question. before i waste more time trying to talk to some random tech who'll likely put me through a couple more hours of worthless trials can anyone tell me if this is possibly an issue on my end (by that i mean in my house). i bought the new modem against my better judgement because the tech told me that if my old one was busted they'd charge me $75 for the service check; figured i had nothing to loose at that point. now that i've replaced it i've got to look at other possible problems in my house before calling to avoid another charge.
so could it be the coax cable from my wall to the modem? could it be an amplifier that they saddle me with years ago that i've got plugged into said coax cable? or could it be that i have two magically dead modems with what appears to be the same random connection issues?