This is a topic I've raised here from time to time, and after last week's tech visit, where the Mediacom plastic box where the line from the pole comes in, and the lines go into my house from, along with the line to my cable modem, original from 2004, and found to be the wrong type of coax from the beginning, was replaced. (The goop coming out of it was a hint that it had gone bad.)
Previously, in November 2018, the drop from the pole to the outside box was replaced, but that tech had ignored the goop in the coax.
The immediate reason for the call for service last week is that in the last few months I had been getting almost daily slow motion dropouts, where the upstream LED on my Netgear CM500 starts to blink, then eventually I lose the entire signal. This would happen most often during the "business" hours from around 8 am to 11 am.
Due to having to work from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the difficulty in getting back into the corporate network after such a dropout, this is much more of a problem than before.
This is similar to the what I've had happen here for many year, regardless of the modem, Mediacom's provided RCA, my Surboards, etc. And a long time ago, after complaining about the rain being a factor, MedicomChad got some sort of repair work done.
The CM500 has a very short event log, so its hard to capture all the trouble spots, but I do see those infamous T3 and T4 timeout errors. So studying that topic again leads me to the wonderful site and article https://volpefirm.com/do-t3-timeouts-impact-my-service/, with the line "A T3 timeout can also be caused by too many users on the CMTS. In this case, a CMTS could have excessive utilization." And also "however changes in user habits, such as a sudden increase in many users working from home and children learning from home, can have drastic and unplanned impacts to a cable operator’s network that they could not have planned."
And another ISP seems be on the warpath against "ingress".
The phone CSRs and visiting techs seem to think that whatever our modems connect to is perfect in every way, and I guess they don't have the inclination or authority to have that angle checked out. Also, it seems that might need a bucket truck to go out and do manual inspections, which no one seems to want to do.
So, MediacomChad, can you help me again here? I know that at any point in time, if Mediacom checks my signal, it will look good at that moment. But that doesn't mean that everything is OK.
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