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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
let me know how it turns out!
My guess is that G580 has a 10/100Mbps NIC. The specs show it can go both ways depending on what SKU you got.
A little slow to connect the dots. Since the 580 was available with 10/100 or 10/100/1000, I realize it makes sense to assume RickO has a 10/100/1000. Thus, the 250 number is almost certainly NOT NIC limited, which aligns with to Darkatt's remarks. I'm so used to a wide variety of speeds on devices (for instance even the Google speakers have 2 different speeds, cameras have 2, displays, etc.) that I didn't make the logical connection to the probably throughput on the Lenovo NIC. Thanks for the insight!
Thanks again guys. Here's another update. After taking the actions below, I've come to the conclusion that I have probably dealing with more than one problem, but the one causing the most pain is, as you suspected, the physical layout of my network. I think I've been expecting WAY too much out of the mesh system. Although I only have a 1900 sq ft townhouse and try to cover it with five mesh pucks, the primary router is all the way at one end of the house. Nowhere near line of sight and certainly not within 10 feet of each other.
So this week I am changing my layout. I'm moving the Cox coax from the office to a location in the primary living quarters. There are 12' ceilings and a very open floorplan. The modem and primary router will reside on a ledge about 9' from the floor and have line of sight to two of the three TVs we use as well as three of the four wifi pucks. I've ordered a 100' run of Cat 6 ethernet cable to run back to the office for my desktop.
Now for the action I took:
* I connected my desktop directly to the modem via a new 24" Cat 5e cable and booted in safe mode. I ran the speed test and speeds jumped from 250 to nearly 500! Encouraged by that, I did a system refresh and reinstalled Windows 10. Probably a good thing to do, but it didn't yield any further improvement.
* I went through the house using the Google Home app to see which point devices were actually connecting as suggested. This was an issue. Many/most of my devices were connecting to points which were clearly not the nearest to them. Some of this may have been caused by me troubleshooting. I was taking points on and off line a lot and devices may have connected to a distant point when the closer points were off line... and then they just didn't change their connection when the entire network came back up. But that was only a part of the problem because I'm still seeing them make odd connections. I'll just keep an eye on it and see if the problem fixes itself when the new layout is in place and stable. At this point though, I have gone to each device and forced it to connect to the closest point.
* I brought all four points into the office with the main router and brought them on line. I felt this would ensure they were operating in a spoke and hub arrangement. Then, using first my phone and then my Chromebook, I forced connection to each puck in turn and ran speed tests (speedtest.net). My phone saw download speeds consistently in the 300 to 450 range... although my Chromebook reported somewhat slower speeds they were still near 200. My five mesh points are a mix of newer and older. I did not run this testing using ethernet backhaul connections. Firmware on each of the pucks is current. The primary router continued to report seeing ~850 mps from the modem.
So at this point I'm optimistic that I'll be able to reconfigure things into a much more functional solution. We'll see what kind of speeds I see once things are stable, but a couple of mysteries remain at this point.
* Why is my desktop only seeing 500 mps (at best) when connected directly to the modem using a short Cat 5e cable?
* Even when in the same room, my points only seemed to provide speeds of <450 mps. I will run a couple of tests using backhaul connections on the three pucks which accept it to see what happens but I haven't done that yet.
Thanks again and I will report back once everything is together.
Rick
It's possible that based on the hardware, you may be topping our your desktop. This comes to mind especially since you stated the router see's 850 from the modem. The fact that it jumped from 250 to 500 DOES show that when running in safe mode, the software in the background slows the computer ½ of the speed that it sees in safe mode. let me know if I can provide any further info!