Cable Internet Connection: Dropping out? Hard-wired

[bmilcs]

About a year ago, my building had issues with internet connectivity. A dozen calls later to Xfinity, and they ended up rewiring the entire floor directly to the power line. This worked great up until about a week ago.

I talked to a technician on the phone and decided it was time to buy my own modem and router. I ended up with the Motorola Arris SB6141 and Netgear AC1750. I installed them yesterday.

I've had several internet hiccups this morning and it makes me anxious. I work from home and it's based on production. With these internet disruptions, I lose money.

As far as my system goes, I am running Windows 7 SP1 w/ Viper's system services disabled to bare bones. I am comfortable with home networking and have my old computer running as a media server that I stream from various tv's on my floor.

Any suggestions or help would be great.

PS Comcast is coming again today

 

[mildocjr]

I am assuming:
You have tested another device in your house for Internet connectivity.
You have tried pinging or moving a file from one device to another within your network (if available).
You have restarted your modem and router leaving them off for at least 15 seconds.

If you live in a neighborhood or on the outskirts of your city limits you may be on a dirty line. (This just means the line has other subscribers that are eating up bandwidth before it gets to you) Typically if you are on a dirty line you will see sub-transfer rates for what you have purchased and can include Internet dropouts, this occurs even if you have a business line.

Another thing to consider is that most of the lines run by Telcos are old and their integrity may have deteriorated. Unfortunately the only control you have on this is what's directly inside of your house. (Cat 5/5e/6, Coax).

I had a similar issue with Wowway a few years ago and they re-wired my house so I would get the speeds I had purchased. Unfortunately I was in a neighborhood on the outskirts of town and the line was so dirty the problem never was resolved. I ended up moving (not because of networking) and never had an issue since.

Other than ensuring that your devices (computers, routers, switches, modems) aren't a cause of the problem and the wiring is done right in your house, you'll be looking at the ISP to fix their line.

One more thing to note and this is for you to decide, if you are doing a lot of data transfer between your house and the outside world you may need to invest in a better modem or router, I know you just purchased one but the low-end devices aren't meant to be slammed with 20+ Mbps up and down 100% of the time, they are good for about 12 hours of Netflix with email and facebook browsing, anything more than that and the device may fail. If you decide that you need to bump your devices you may look at getting equipment that can handle business workloads instead of consumer workloads. (Consumer focuses in on speed and security more than reliability, whereas business focuses in reliability and security more than speed but business is going to be rated for Gbit Ethernet anyways)