Dramatic decrease in download speeds

[Cloud Strife]

We had a Comcast tech. come to our house today to activate some of our wall jacks for cable TV. After he left, I checked my bandwidth speeds on speakeasy and noticed it significantly dropped. Instead of the advertised 6Mbps down, I'm getting 2-3Mbps. To make sure that my router wasn't acting up, I connected my laptop directly the cable modem and still received the same results. Here's the signal I'm getting on the Motorola modem:

Frequency 729000000 Hz Locked
Signal to Noise Ratio 28 dB
Power Level -19 dBmV

Could activating the wall jacks for cable TV have affected my internet speeds?

 

[cmetz]

Yes. You've just split the signal and possibly introduced reflections. Also make sure that the tech didn't install any traps/filters around when he was there.

Call Comcast and have them send out a repair technician to diagnose the problem. They broke it, make them fix it.

 

[Cloud Strife]

I think he activated about 3 jacks. Is disabling the jacks the only way to get my bandwidth back?

 

[nova2]

just split the main cable line once, split 1 to cable modem, split 2 will be used for every cable jack in your house.

I haven't had signal problems with 1 cable modem + 4 TV's (and all their splits).

if you get bad signal problems doing this, then I'd say it's either some shoddy or defective splitters being used, or perhaps your cable line tap isn't supplying as much strength as mine, or some of your RG6 cables are damaged (doubtful). I had a cable tech mention that he would put in a work order to increase our cable line tap voltage, or something like that, he was on site with us, too.

keep us updated (please) - i wanna hear how this goes.

 

[Cloud Strife]

Originally posted by: nova2
keep us updated (please) - i wanna hear how this goes.

I called up Comcast this afternoon and they said there were some outages in my area. It's 8:30PM now and the speeds are a little better, ~3.5Mbps. It looks like the problem was due to power outages, not the cable splits. Hopefully by tomorrow the speeds will be back to normal.

The funny thing is before we had the wall jacks activated and downgraded our cable TV service, our cable line was split into 2 lines, one for the modem and the other was for cable TV. Then line 2 was split again into 3 lines. Everything was fine until we downgraded to basic cable TV. They probably added some filter that lowered our signal?

 

[nova2]

yes, perhaps he added a filter to your line.

look around for a cylinder shaped object connected to one of your cable lines (or anything else that seems questionable).

some months after a bad lightning storm (cost me $$), I managed to find a small hole exposing the copper of my rg6 cable, needless to say, I wasn't sure if the lightning or the fence did it, but I tapped that sucker up, and no, I wasn't having any cable modem problems.

 

[Cloud Strife]

Originally posted by: nova2
yes, perhaps he added a filter to your line.

look around for a cylinder shaped object connected to one of your cable lines (or anything else that seems questionable).

some months after a bad lightning storm (cost me $$), I managed to find a small hole exposing the copper of my rg6 cable, needless to say, I wasn't sure if the lightning did it, but I tapped that sucker up, and no, I wasn't having any cable modem problems.

lol, not going to mess around with cable equipment.

 

[Cloud Strife]

It's been a couple days now and the speeds are still way below normal. I called up Comcast once again and they discovered my modem's signal is on the edge of being normal. Then they told me to check my local TV channels to see if they're fuzzy. Indeed, the picture quality on the local channels were horrible. They told me that the Cable TV line was interfering with my internet signal, and once i get that fixed, my speeds should be back to normal.

Damn Comcast and their half-ass techs.