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I would sure appreciate some guidance here. I try to keep up but I can get over my head pretty quickly so please bear with me. My problem is that, for well over a year, I have been paying Cox for Gigabit internet and Complete Care, but my system performance never really got close to that. It has gotten progressively worse and now it is almost unusable from my wireless devices. The ethernet connected desktop is usable but only tests at about 250mbps.
The symptoms are that pages can take 15 seconds to load and sometimes not at all and when streaming I get some minor buffering. The wife and I are retired and stream tv in the evenings but other than that it’s pretty much just checking email and Facebook. These problems occur on our Chromebooks, laptops, and iPads.
I use Cox only for internet. My modem is now an Arris SB8200. My Wi-Fi is Google Mesh with five pucks to cover our house which is under 1900 sq ft. My desktop is a Lenovo connected to the Google Mesh via ethernet. Speed test results (speedtest.net) are pretty consistent:
Last week I finally called Cox Complete Care. I had to run through the story with four different agents. Each time I had to start from the beginning and comply with their instructions as they worked through their obligatory scripts. A warm transfer sure would have been nice. In the end they agreed to send out a tech. The tech was out the next day and did the following:
Following his visit I read through several forums and decided to replace my Motorola MB 8600 with the Arris SB 8200. I had been seeing huge numbers of corrected and uncorrectable errors on a few channels and thought it was worth a shot. The Arris has provided the same results as the Motorola. I’ve also noticed that the SB8200 front panel lights indicate that both up and down are blue, I believe indicating that the connection is not allowing connection to DOCSIS 3.1. The event log was also showing a lot of Dynamic Range Window Violations but I performed a hard reset on the modem this morning so most were wiped away. I’ve attached a file containing the Connection Status which I just took. It too was wiped clean with the hard reset this morning but maybe something will give a clue.
Thanks in advance for any help you might have!!!
The status listed show the connection state of the cable modem. They are used by your service provider to evaluate the operation of the cable modem.
Current System Time: Mon Mar 6 15:01:22 2023
Your signal levels look great. Looks like you have the recent upgrade to two downstream OFDM channels and one upstream OFDM channel. That is why both lights are blue.
So the speeds from the modem to router is 850Mbps but the speeds the devices are lower. Have you tried upgrading the firmware of the router? Also, what model is it exactly? GA02434-US?
FYI, if you want an ACCURATE Speedtest, test with a computer connected direct to the 8200, using a cat5e or cat 6 cable for a 1000baseTX connection, and run the speedtest. If that looks good, you have no further than the wifi to look at. BTW, I am on preferred, 250 mbps internet and using a single DG2460 downstairs, and a TPLING powerline adapter to the upstairs WiFi mesh, and my average internet speed is easily 250 on ethernet, and faster, while WiFi is 237 of 5ghz and 220 on 2.4 ghz on most of my equipment. The SLOWEST I get is 80 mbps on 2.4 on my upstairs TV, which is on a room across the hall from the mesh powerline adapter, with both doors closed.
Looks like my previous post went into the bitbucket. My configuration is much like yours, only an MB8600 on the front. Testing directly from laptop to the back of the modem, or via the primary Google router (using either Google Home or Google WiFi apps) typically show about 550 - 580. I'm on the 500 mbps plan. My signal goes from the primary router to a gigabit switch and I use an ethernet connection to each of the 4 remaining Google routers. If you have the Google WiFi app, you can run the full set of internet/mesh/wifi tests in series. More importantly, when the 'Test Mesh' function completes, hit the ellipsis in the top right corner to see details. That will tell you exactly how fast your secondaries are talking to the primary. Mine are routinely in the 500 mbps range. The Lenovo desktop I am writing this on is using wifi and hits 400 mbps +. My wife's laptop is on ethernet and will run about 500 mbps. Two things come to mind. With multiple nodes, you can have extra challenges with a device grabbing a connection and staying on it even if the device moves. My wife's Samsung tablet is notorious for that. She'll start it in her bedroom, it will connect on a 5ghz, and then bring it down in the basement where the 5ghz connection is weak, but it won't readily reconnect. She has to turn wifi off and back on to get it to transfer to a more appropriate node. The other question is which way are your Google nodes connected? If they are not using ethernet backhaul, is there any possibility one or more have a bad connection, and/or they are functionin in a "daisy-chain" fashion rather than "hub and spoke"? The Google WiFi app will give you good insight. If you can't run in, then I'd take a laptop or other reasonably portable device with an ethernet connection and test it hardwired 1) To the Arris SB8200 2) To the Primary Google 3/4/5/6 ) To each remaining Google router. OH, and are you using first gen or second gen Google routers? I should have asked right up front. Second Gen don't support ethernet backhaul. That makes network configuration more tricky, but the approach outlined above should help you sort it out. If you post back with more detail, I can offer more suggestions. If you are on Gen 2, you may want to put all of the routers in line of sight and check performance and ensure baseline performance is appropriate. After that, work on physical layout in the house, which may require using WiFi Analyzer or WiFiman or something of that sort to ensure each secondary router establishes a proper mesh connections.
Thanks much. The speeds I cited as being ~250mbps was with the PC connected directly to the modem.
Thanks for the great advice. I have some homework to do and will report back.