Yesterday during the morning rain, my Internet pipe got all clogged up and refused to pass internets. I was getting less than a megabit where I should have been getting somewhere in the neighborhood of 28 of them.
But when the rain stopped and the sun came out and things started drying out, the pipe started to unclog, slowly, until by about 3PM I had all my megabits back. Even then it kept blipping. I ran another speedtest at around 5PM and only had about 4 megabits.
Being a newly-minted (well, year-old) ham (thank you Bobbi), I got to thinking about rain and coax, and the fact that the piece of coax coming from the service drop to the modem is pretty damn old and not intended to be used in the manner in which it has been used for the last 25 years or so (it was a 25' extension CATV coax that had been pressed into service when I didn't have any RG6 handy to make the run).
So I got to thinking that a) it's old non-outdoor-rated coax, and b), the connection is way down the wall practically on the ground next to the bottom of a leader pipe that probably splashes water on it on a regular basis. And even with Comcast's fancy-dancy "weatherproof" coax connectors, it's probably getting water in it.
Here is what the modem log looked like earlier this morning (read it bottom to top):*
| Apr 26 2014 09:01:00 | 5-Warning | T202.0 | Lost MDD Timeout;CM-MAC=f8:0b:be:dd:13:xx;CMTS-MAC=00:01:5c:23:93:xx;CM-QOS=1.1;CM-VER=3.0; |
| Apr 26 2014 09:01:00 | 3-Critical | R04.0 | Received Response to Broadcast Maintenance Request, But no Unicast Maintenance opportunities received – T4 time out;CM-MAC=f8:0b:be:dd:13:xx;CMTS-MAC=00:01:5c:23:93:xx;CM-QOS=1.1;CM-VER=3.0; |
Tonnes of these paired entries going back every few minutes (sometimes every minute) for days.
As it happens, we used to have Dish Network in the house, and there is a coax outlet for that right next to my ham shack, which is also where the modem lives. The RG6 line to that was cut off, but as it also happens, I cut it off close to the cable drop with about 6 feet to spare, thinking that one day I'd repurpose it for a cable outlet in that room. So I went out this morning, ran it into the cable drop enclosure, stuck an RG6 connector on it (I'll go back later and rubber-tape it, like a good ham), and now the log looks like this:
| Apr 26 2014 09:04:08 | 5-Warning | Z00.0 | MIMO Event MIMO: Stored MIMO=-1 post cfg file MIMO=-1;CM-MAC=f8:0b:be:dd:13:xx;CMTS-MAC=00:01:5c:23:93:xx;CM-QOS=1.1;CM-VER=3.0; |
| Jan 01 1970 00:02:33 | 3-Critical | T05.0 | SYNC Timing Synchronization failure – Loss of Sync;CM-MAC=f8:0b:be:dd:13:xx;CMTS-MAC=00:01:5c:23:93:xx;CM-QOS=1.1;CM-VER=3.0; |
| Jan 01 1970 00:00:15 | 6-Notice | N/A | Cable Modem Reboot due to T4 timeout ;CM-MAC=f8:0b:be:dd:13:xx;CMTS-MAC=00:00:00:00:00:00;CM-QOS=1.1;CM-VER=3.0; |
I mean, literally, that's all that is in the log past the point where I disconnected the old cable and it rebooted before I connected the new one. (I find it interesting that this fancy-ass DOCSIS 3 modem doesn't appear to have a real-time clock. But I digress.)
Gee, I think I had a bad piece of coax…DUH.
Speedtest results starting yesterday and running through just a few minutes ago:
| Test Date | TZ | Down | Up | Ping |
| 4/25/2014 13:08 | GMT | 22.24 | 0.45 | 24 |
| 4/25/2014 14:00 | GMT | 19.08 | 1.1 | 23 |
| 4/25/2014 14:44 | GMT | 1.87 | 0.11 | 23 |
| 4/25/2014 16:20 | GMT | 2.38 | 5.72 | 23 |
| 4/25/2014 16:24 | GMT | 5.32 | 5.87 | 24 |
| 4/25/2014 16:29 | GMT | 1.43 | 5.85 | 25 |
| 4/25/2014 16:30 | GMT | 29.1 | 5.85 | 25 |
| 4/25/2014 16:37 | GMT | 3.56 | 5.79 | 25 |
| 4/25/2014 16:41 | GMT | 1.39 | 5.84 | 25 |
| 4/25/2014 16:42 | GMT | 14.44 | 5.38 | 25 |
| 4/25/2014 16:43 | GMT | 12.04 | 5.81 | 24 |
| 4/25/2014 17:23 | GMT | 3.85 | 5.77 | 23 |
| 4/25/2014 18:23 | GMT | 28.84 | 5.98 | 23 |
| 4/25/2014 19:47 | GMT | 28.81 | 5.89 | 23 |
| 4/26/2014 14:49 | GMT | 28.85 | 5.9 | 23 |
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* Yes, I've minimally obfuscated the MAC addresses. Be that way.