Intermittently I have problems with my cable connection. The last time I had a problem some guy came in, questioned why I had my setup the way it was setup then said something outside was broken and giving me poor signal quality. They replaced it and my net was working fine again.

This time I had a very super weird problem. My net connection to any single thing was always terrible (200Kb or so) but I could have tons of connections and it will max out my connection at around 4Mb. Meaning if I have 1 youtube video up, it sucks. I have to start it and hit pause and wait for it to download a bit. But if I had 10 youtube videos up they would all max out my connection up to about 4Mb but each be individually slow regardless of how much other stuff I was downloading. Things like Free Download Manager and bit torrent were still great and able to download things super fast.

So I finally have free time and call up the cable company and they came by yesterday. I explained that last time some weird thing outside had to be replaced. So he checked that thing and said he replaced all the connectors. But before that he also questioned my setup.

My apt has only one cable connection in the living room on the farthest wall. So what I do is I split it at that source 2 ways, one to the TV and one super long coax to the bedroom. In the bedroom I split it 3 ways, one to the modem and two to my TVs (one physical and one TV tuner on my computer). It’s a pretty nasty setup I imagine to have it split so many times.

Ok so he grills me about it and says that I should strongly consider moving my modem to the living room at the first split. The problem with this is that I have a super long ethernet cable back out to the living room supplying my Xbox with net. So I’d have to do some of crazy things to that working. Strangely on my 3 way splitter it turns out the modem was on the wrong prong and that matters as the splitter isn’t evenly balanced and one gets better signal than the others. This helped a little. In the end he left as he had done all he could and I was looking at 5Mb connection or so.

Thinking and knowing my setup was suboptimal I decided to go ahead and move the modem to the living room. It wasn’t a huge pain but I had to bring the router out there as well. This left me with the long ethernet cable I had been using for the Xbox now going into my PC but then the bedroom wouldn’t have any extra ethernet ports so I added a switch in there.

Ok once all this was done the modem was awesome. One speed test showed 11Mb which is 1Mb faster than I should get and what I would chalk up as a fluke, however most other tests showed I was at 10Mb which is what I should be getting. However now my bedroom TV reception sucked. I’m totally boggled but at the same time this is probably the same phenomenon that was making my modem suck in the bedroom.

So I look at the super long coax cable and I had forgotten it was like 50 feet too long. So I have this huge bundle of coax hiding in the bottom of the end table of my couch. Well I pick it up to see if maybe my cats had eaten it or something and it looked fine, then I put it back. Well after that the TV reception in the bedroom was flawless. I suspect there might have been some kind of kink in the cable or something and my messing with it unkinked it. The idea that all of this stemmed from that is kind of ridiculous but I wouldn’t put it past reality.

Interestingly I asked the guy before he left about these Motorola signal boosters I always see on sale and if they worked and he said they work great but the problem is you don’t want too strong a signal coming into the modem so there’s some weird caveat there that I don’t fully understand but it is interesting to know that those things work.

Anyway, the main lesson here is manage your cables well and make sure they’re in good condition. Also put your modem as close to a wall outlet and before as many splitters as you can.