Cable Modems and routers can be finicky things...Follow

I had a 5 year old Linksys cable modem. When I was at home, after work, I got full speed no problem. But my brother always said that during the day it would stall out for 5-6 minutes at a time. I figured, what the hell, my modem is old, doesn't support DOCSIS 3.0, so the cable company won't touch it, and doesn't support higher speed connections. I purchased a new Motorola that supports 3.0.

I spent one night after work configuring it and getting it to work. Tested it out and got about 9mbps, not bad since I was paying for 12mbps. But then, it kept dropping every day. 7mbps the second day, 5mbps the third day, 3mbps the following afternoon. Checked out all the single strengths/noise ratio, all the statistics that the modem reported, everything good. Restarted the router once, no change. Called the cable company to ask about it, they checked everything out (remotely) said it seemed fine. They checked area usage and said there was no users with high usage that would cause it.

So today, I just checked my routers firmware, updated it, and suddenly it's back up to 18-19mbps. I can't tell if it's the firmware upgrade on my router that fixed it or not. Since it had been restarted since...

UPnP is enabled. I will disable it. I always wondered why my router popped up as a plug and play device every time I turned on my computer.

Overall I'm hoping my connection becomes more stable. For years it was problem free, very stable. And about 6-8 months ago my wireless connection would start to freeze. I had a Linksys WRT54G, and would have to restart it daily. Purchased a new Belkin router and for a while it was great, then everything started being flaky. Upgraded the cable modem to a DOCSIS 3.0 version and for about 1 night it was great. Updated the firmware tonight and it went back to the way it was before the first router would lock up.

All this has done some good. I've discovered I can actually log in to the cable modems and get some pretty details information about my connection. I had that old linksys modem for close to 5 years and didn't realize I could do that.

Edited, Nov 11th 2011 9:06pm by TirithRR