Sanity Check

C

cosine_omerta

New Member
I have a stupid question. Help me be uncrazy.

I recently moved my cable modem and router from one side of my house to the other. Originally the coax was originating from a really old, falling apart wall plate, which I replaced with a shiny new one with gold plating and added a right angle adapter to keep the cable from getting crimped. I then ran a 25' coax to the other side of the room to my relocated modem. I did a bandwidth test just to see where my speed was, and it is a great deal lower then it used to be, and it varies now. Sometimes its just over a Mbps, sometimes its 3, sometimes its 15, and I am not touching or moving the cable in anyway.

Tell me that adding a right angle bracket and 25' of coax wouldn't make my speed jump all over the place and that obviously my ISP (TWC) is unreliable, and that I just didn't notice it before.

Thanks for any thoughts. It's driving me crazy.
 
I'm no expert in coax, but I do know if you're on the 'end of the line' so to speak (ie, far from a repeater or amplifier) your symptoms certainly can happen. I know when we added about 100 foot of line to our house and moved the modem, we had to get an amplifier or our modem wouldn't detect internet at all.

However, there are a couple of tests you can do first. Mostly involving a multimeter, check your cables and your right angle bracket for continuity. It should have 0 ohms of resistance. Try other cables, and other wallplates. See if your problems go away with just general troubleshooting, you know?
 
Additionally, make sure that your connections are tight.

Check resistance from center to shield. You should get no continuity.

Did you 'unkink' the original cable, or you used the right-angle for the new piece of cable?

I'm assuming that the new piece of cable was store-bought 25' pre-fabricated coax.
 
In order to rule out your ISP as the problem, you could try running a few speedtests on a neighbor's connect, if that's an option.
 
I only have the one wallplate. The 25' of coax is actually a store bought length that I had used previously to have my modem where it is again now. My connections are nice and tight, and there isn't any damage or crimps in the cable. And testing on a neighbors isn't possible.

I'm definitely going to do some simple testing with other cables and such, but if those result in the same problem, I guess I'll get a multimeter and do some testing. When you say test for continuity, both Dngrsone and kobaj, I assume you mean connect to the center cable and then to the outer rim of the connector? I'm not very familiar with multimeter usage.

Thanks for your advice.
 
You should have infinite (most multimeters show as 1) ohms of resistance from center pin to outer ring. You should have 0 (or near 0, like .001) ohms of resistance from center pin to center pin, and outer ring to outer ring of the two different connections on the cable/wall outlet/jack/other cable bits needed to be tested.

Thought if both the 25 foot section and the outlet were store bought, I don't know why you're having such issue.
 
you need to make sure the coax line connecting to your cable modem is on the FIRST split from the outside line....
 
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