is this good or bad signal strength?

[Zalgo]

I've been slowly honing in on my modem being the issue for my internet issues. I just need one more thing to be confirmed. And that is my signal strength. I have no idea how to read these but i've seen some on here post them so I'll give it a shot.

Here is my signal strength with my modem connected directly to my PC.

 

[dudio]

Concern yourself most with the 'Power' column. Your Upstream is good .. anything under 50 dB means that the modem isn't struggling on the 'Return' path. Your Downstream however is not awesome. Any of the ones that say QAM should be at 0 Db or higher (show a '+' reading), whereas yours are negative indicating a weak signal to you. Hard to say if it's something you can fix. Most often it's caused by over-splitting of the signal within the home.

 

[Zalgo]

So would that suddenly effect speed? I am using a splitter just to connect my cable box but this hasn't given me any speed issues since i've installed this setup in march 19th of this year.

My issue has been I've been getting extremely slower than normal speeds pretty much out of nowhere one night and its been the same for the past 4-5 days now.

I am on a 200 megabit/s plan on comcast. On average I would pretty much get close to 200 and down to probably 80 on the somewhat rare occasion that comcast is having some sort of "hiccup" with there service. I am not averaging no more than 5 megabits per second with an upload speed of 11+ megabits per second (another weird issue). both on wifi and wired internet. I've done multiple resets and even a full power down overnight which seemed to work sometimes and am still facing this issue.

I have another modem downstairs on a separate network for streaming via ethernet and that is getting close to 100 megabits per second download with 30+ megabit upload.

 

[bill001g]

Your numbers are pretty good well withing the recommended ranges you will find. As you can see the 2 that have a little lower SNR are getting more errors. There is not a lot you can do to fix this. Most issues would be with the physical cable. Poor quality splitters or maybe dirt or water in a connection. Still you numbers look ok......now it does depend on how long the modem has been on . 400k errors even if they are correctable in a couple minutes is bad but if it has been hours or even days then this number means little.

Many people run with much lower numbers than you have. Hard to say but I would say this should not be the cause of a problem.

 

[bill001g]

Run tracert to 8.8.8.8. Then ping hop 1 and hop 2 with a continuous ping in 2 different cmd windows. Hop1 is your router and you should always see extremely low values and no loss. Hop 2 is the ISP router (in most cases as long as you only have a single router) and you should see a consistently fairly low number here. Loss indicates a problem...these would be the errors you see. High latency spikes is likely some issue in the ISP network

If you are only running a modem and no router at all then hop 1 is the isp first router. A modem/router combo still is a router

 

[Zalgo]

i'm running a

Netgear CM500 as my modem and a Netgear r7000 as my wifi router.

During this screencap I was just running my modem directly to my PC.

I guess my only best bet is to call up comcast for a tech. Something i'm dreading for obvious reason if anyone has ever had to deal with comcast tech support lol.

 

[Zalgo]

here is my tracert results.

for this I am running my usual setup Netgear r7000 wifi router and CM500 modem.

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.


Tracing route to google-public-dns-a.google.com [8.8.8.8]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms
2 28 ms 9 ms 9 ms
3 9 ms 8 ms 8 ms
4 13 ms 13 ms 24 ms
5 13 ms 13 ms 12 ms
6 18 ms 19 ms 19 ms
7 1112 ms 1004 ms 999 ms
8 19 ms 17 ms 18 ms
9 17 ms 17 ms 17 ms
10 18 ms 19 ms 17 ms
11 19 ms 18 ms 18 ms
12 17 ms 19 ms 17 ms

Trace complete.

i'm guessing #7 is the most concerning result.

 

[Zalgo]

I removed the adresses being pinged for security reasons (I probably am being stupid and didn't have to).

anyways, I noticed that as soon as it gets to the 7th ping is where issues are. I ran another tracert and #7 just timed out.

there is where #7 was pinging in the test I posted.

be-10925-cr01.sunnyvale.ca.ibone.comcast.net [68
.86.87.157]

 

[Zalgo]

I now ran tracert by directly connecting my netgear cm500 modem and there were my results

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Tracing route to google-public-dns-a.google.com [8.8.8.8]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms
2 8 ms 8 ms 8 ms
3 15 ms 24 ms 12 ms
4 20 ms 12 ms 15 ms
5 18 ms 19 ms 17 ms
6 28 ms 17 ms 17 ms
7 17 ms 26 ms 19 ms
8 17 ms 18 ms 18 ms
9 17 ms 17 ms 17 ms
10 18 ms 20 ms 19 ms
11 18 ms 27 ms 17 ms

Trace complete.

I ran it multiple times and noticed that there were times in which parts of the #6 ping would time out but it would just be once or twice and it would still be able to complete the ping.

 

[bill001g]

You are showing no problems. Problem is tracert does not send enough data for long enough. Ping also may not send enough data but when you send it constantly it should detect random issues.

You have to be very careful of tracert and how you interpret it. Just because hop 7 has issues by itself means nothing. A real problem would also cause issues farther down the chain.

Lets say these were street lights on your way to work. If hop 7 delayed you 5 minutes then hop 8 would also see that delay. It would not be possible to pass though a light at hop7 and then magically you get that 5 minutes back, a real delay will increase it all the way to the end

Maybe it is load related. Try to download something say from steam and force it to only download at say 50% of your capacity. Your ping times should not be affected much.

 

[Zalgo]

So you gave me a good idea about a speed test. I decided to do an unrestricted download test on a moderately sized game (Garry's mod) 4gb. It averaged at 5+ megaBYTES per second and took about 8 mins to download. Now, when I do a speed test I still get very slow speeds and am still feeling it when I'm web browsing (buffering videos, slow loading pictures) and am still kind of lagging in games like overwatch. I have no idea what's going on now.

These are the speeds using internet health checker a very reliable checker imo because it uses multiple testing areas.


Here are the results on my separate artist router/modem combo downstairs (Comcast rented) on a different network:

And here are the results on my router and modem setup upstairs even after getting an average of 5+ MB/s.

i still guess my only option is to call and see if there's anything they could do. If it is this modem it's still under replacement warrenty until March of next year.

 

[bill001g]

It has to be something strange. Maybe they configured it wrong on their end and are limiting you to the wrong plan

 

[dudio]

What are the signal strengths showing as on the other modem if you check?
You said you only had 1 split to a TV, but obviously there is another split happening to feed the other modem. What happens when you swap splitter outputs for the modems (if you can)?

 

[Zalgo]

Well the other modem was just talked about to show how drastic the speed differences are for two modems in the same house.

Other than that the other modem (the rented one I am not having issues with) is nowhere near the modem that I am having issues with which is in my room.


Here's my setup:

Living room on the other side of the house
Arris modem/router combo

My room:
Netgear CM500 modem
Netgear r7000 router

 

[bill001g]

Is sharing the other internet connection a option. If so you can threaten the ISP to fix it or you will just cancel.

You can likely share the other connection with powerline networks ..the av2 at 1200m will easily run 100m or you can use moca and use the coax cable. Moca tends to be more expensive so I would recommend the powerline units first

 

[Zalgo]

Now, here's where I ran into interesting results.

A Friend suggested using another computer to connect to my router in place of my main PC.

I used my laptop:

Almost like magic my laptop is getting Ethernet speeds that are somewhat close to what I'm used to which is close to 100 mb/s. When I try to download a game on steam from my laptop I get 10 megabytes average (which is close to 100 megabits). Here's the best part, when I test my wifi device (iPhone) I almost instantly got fast wifi speeds (which is around 50 megabits, a little slow but a lot better than 4-5 megabits).

I also failed to mention that I think I was overloading a plug prior to this issue so I moved my power strip that my computer is on to another wall outlet (about 5 feet away). And it stopped the breaker from being flipped in my room but obviously it gave me this speed issue somehow.

Now I switched the configuration back to what it was prior to this (plug wise) I disconnected some things to prevent a possible switch flip and again my speeds are somewhat back to normal on my main PC. I try something else which is to put that power strip back to the outlet that was giving it issues and this disconnected the PC from that power strip and plugged it directed into the outlet that was possibly being overloaded. As soon as I did that I was instantly back to my speeds I'm used I and then some. Which was 200+ megabits per second (and my iPhone wifi speeds were around 80mb/s)

Fast forward to this morning where for kicks I plugged my PC back into the power strip that's plugged into the outlet that was causing a speed drop and the speeds somewhat diminished but stayed at 100mb/s +) (I think I was getting 200+ because it was around 2am when I tested and congestion was low). Then put the plug directly into the outlet that was possibly getting overloaded and the speeds started to deminish this time, so I started to think maybe it was the PSU plug. I swapped out the plug and the speeds slowly started to creep back up to normal (with the wifi speeds following).

I'm really sorry if that is a bad explanation but I'm just as confused as to what's happening and am still testing things out.

Also keep in mind the speeds I'm meantionin are all download because my upload speeds stay the same no matter was (if that means anything)


ALSO, I have tested all my plugs via the power strips (because the outlet holes are too small for the multimeter prongs). And they all read an average of 123.9 volts under load which from what i've seen is normal. I am going to buy a outlet meter and a plug tester to see more results.

 

[Zalgo]

Oh and those signal ratings I posted earlier. where there was some concern on the "power" tab being in the negatives.

They are all in the positives now.