Hi guys,
Long time lurker and sometimes anonymous poster - decided to finally register to try and get some help on an issue I've been experiencing.
My story begins approximately 6 weeks ago when one Saturday night a drunk driver wiped out one of the large cable cabinets on the main trunk route to Windsor. My connection and everyone else's in the town was out for a whole day while they replaced the entire cabinet and all the equipment in the cab...
Everything was back up and running and fine I thought... Until I few days later I noticed that I had full downstream speed (I'm on 120Mb tier) and literally no upstream speed (around 0.5).
I called Start and went through the usual hoops - reset modem, without router, different ethernet cable etc etc. I was experiencing packet loss somewhere in the realm of 40%.... not good. We collected all the usual levels, pings etc and sent them off to Cogeco.
Then it resolved itself before Cogeco picked up the ticket. I thought maybe they'd done something to fix it and was happy again. Of course Cogeco said there's nothing wrong and closed the ticket....
A couple of days went by and it happened again, back to full downstream speed and basically no upstream. Called Start again, went through the same hoops again and submitted another ticket to Cogeco. Same again, resolved itself, only to come back again after they've closed the ticket.
Suspecting a modem issue now (I have a TC4300 which replaced a faulty DCM476 - so seemed unlikely I could be looking at a second failed modem, but went along with it), Start sent me a rental DCM476 to test with. Exactly the same thing happened.... At least it proved the modem wasn't the issue.
A few days went by again and I saw them working on the previously wiped out cabinet. Then my issue was fixed.... For much longer this time. By this point Start had already scheduled an appointment with Cogeco to send out a tech to take a look at my line. Of course by the time the appointment came, the issue wasn't manifesting itself and he found nothing.... My levels look great he said, but he replaced the coax connectors anyway just for good measure.
A few more days went by, still no problem, at this point I was declaring victory and asked Start to swap back to my modem so I could return their rental modem. We did the swap and everything was still fine.... Over a week later, still fine. At this point I was convinced it was fixed, then it reoccurred!! Arrrrgh.
So now I'm back to the same situation again - full downstream speed, but terrible upload. Packet loss doesn't seem to be quite as bad as it was before, but still really terrible upload speeds.
I'm at a loss what to do now - Start don't seem to be able to get Cogeco to accept there's an issue at the box that was replaced, it may be coincidental but seems fairly suspect to me that my issues coincide with it being replaced.
Why is my issue intermittent? That I'm not entirely sure about but my working theory at this point is that certain upstream channels are faulty and when I'm not operating on those channels everything is fine. I do see different upstream frequencies in my modem - so they must be operating more than just 4 at my node? Interestingly sometimes I only get 3 upstream channels bonded on my modem and sometimes 4. What causes a modem do change upstream channels? Is there any way I can force it to change channels? (a reset just seems to bring it up on the same channels again). Do Cogeco use all the upstream channels simultaneously? I found some older posts that suggested they only use one, but don't know if that's still accurate since they moved to 10Mb upload.
Here's my levels currently :-
Downstream Channel
Channel Lock Status Modulation Channel ID Symbol Rate Frequency Power SNR
1 Locked QAM256 195 5360537 519000000 Hz 8.4 dBmV 40.8 dB
2 Locked QAM256 193 5360537 507000000 Hz 8.5 dBmV 40.8 dB
3 Locked QAM256 194 5360537 513000000 Hz 8.5 dBmV 40.8 dB
4 Locked QAM256 196 5360537 525000000 Hz 8.4 dBmV 40.8 dB
5 Locked QAM256 197 5360537 531000000 Hz 8.3 dBmV 40.8 dB
6 Locked QAM256 198 5360537 537000000 Hz 8.3 dBmV 40.4 dB
7 Locked QAM256 199 5360537 543000000 Hz 8.2 dBmV 40.4 dB
8 Locked QAM256 200 5360537 549000000 Hz 8.1 dBmV 40.3 dB
Upstream Channel
Channel Lock Status Modulation Channel ID Symbol Rate Frequency Power
1 Locked QAM64 3 5120 Ksym/sec 36604000 Hz 42.0 dBmV
2 Locked QAM64 1 5120 Ksym/sec 23648000 Hz 39.5 dBmV
3 Locked QAM64 2 5120 Ksym/sec 30204000 Hz 40.0 dBmV
4 Not Locked Unknown 0 0 Ksym/sec 0.0 dBmV
This is where I stand speed wise...
DSL Reports Speed Test is a little better than Speedtest because I think it runs multiple upload streams.
Packet loss isn't too bad at the moment at around 4%, but at times it has been as high as 40%...
--- www.google.ca ping statistics ---
105 packets transmitted, 101 packets received, 3.8% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 13.369/24.885/156.238/26.907 ms
Looking for any feedback or insight as to where to go from here....
Thanks!
↧