Coax vs Ethernet length

[Eeddii22]

Hello so I have cable internet that comes in from outside into my attic with a coaxial cable. The coaxial cable goes from my attic about another 75 feet into my room. I heard over 100 feet and you start having signal loss and it's definitely over 100 from my room to the drop. I have been experiencing packet loss and I just wanted to replace this first before I try anything else since it's an old and cheap cable. Would it be better to place the modem in the room closest to the attic using only about 20 feet of coaxial cable and then running another 50 cat6 from the modem to my room and into the router or just use a brand new 75 foot coaxial cable all the way through?

 

[jsmithepa]

The cable installer would had made signal strength adjustment.

But OK, assuming your theory has some validity, it's relatively simple enough to place the modem closer just for testing purposes then you'd know.

 

[bill001g]

If it is just a modem....ie it does not have wireless.... then it should not really matter where you place the modem. It could go in the attic itself if it is not really hot and you had power. That said it won't be any faster than putting it in your room if you had a strong signal on the coax.

It is mostly just going to be how can you get enough signal to the cable modem to not get packet loss. You should be able to look at the numbers in the modem and see all the db ratings. There are charts that show what values you are recommended depending on things like if it is docsis2 or docsis3 and a few other things.

It depend on what you want to buy first to try. If you have long ethernet and extra coax around you have more options. What you likely should do first though is connect the cable modem to the point as close to where it comes into the house as possible and see the signal levels there compared to at the far end of your cables. Unless you have very poor cable or splitters you most times can not detect any difference. If you can see a increase at the far end then replacing the cable is likely a good choice. If you see little difference I would consider the ethernet option because it means your signal is marginal when it gets to the house already....or something else is causing the loss if the numbers are strong.