[Cialug] [OT] Flaky Broadband Connection

[david l goodrich]

On Mon, May 14, 2007 3:40 pm, Claus wrote:
> You guys seem to know a lot about cable and DSL internet access so I
> just have to ask this question.
>
> The Cox broadband connections at my parents in law in Omaha is extremely
> flaky.  It drops connections multiple times a day.  At first I thought
> it was the wireless router since I used wireless but I finally
> experienced it being connected via wire.  It's to the point that this is
> very annoying to me. Obvious proof that my father in law rarely is using
> his computer.


I had this same problem with a Comcast cable modem in Maryland.  I ended
up writing a shellscript that logged into the web interface for the
WRT54g, pulled out the gateway address, and pinged it once.  I put it in
cron to run every 10 minutes.

Never had a problem with stability after that, it was like the cable
network "forgot" we existed or something.


> I heard from my brother in law that he experienced such behavior from
> Comcast as and from some previous DSL.  Is it really that common?  I
> always had a rock solid Internet connection with my Qwest[1] DSL and FN
> connection at home as well as any wireless access points I've used.  So
> my tolerance for flakiness is pretty low.

No, I wouldn't say this is common.  I've had internet connections of
various types in various communities in various parts of the country, and
this is the only one I can think of as being really bad.  Everything else
has been consistently stable.