Slow comcast internet

August 13, 2012 8:34:57 PM

in my area comcast is the fastest ISP, 2 of my friends also have comcast but their internet seems to be pretty damn fast. my internet seems to be much slower than theirs and they are both in a 1 block radius away.

my family has a lot of internet connected devices. 2 desktops, 1 laptop, 4 android devices, vonage phone, xbox 360, netflix instant player.

i have a standard comcast modem which connects to an airport extreme base station, the vonage and all other devices are connected to the airport express either by cat6 ethernet cables or 2.4ghz wireless [used to have a few 5ghz devices but we longer have them so i disabled that].

i used to use a LAN switch but it was too problematic and i would be resetting something daily so i got a airport extreme [ive had other airport products that always worked flawlessly for years] and that seemed to fix all of the problems and bumped up the speed [compared to direct connection to modem]

every ethernet cable in the entire house is cat6. both desktops, the xbox and vonage are hard lined, everything else is wireless

we do quite a bit of netflix instant watching, typically that never has lag problems

i was thinking about replacing the stock comcast modem with a motorola surfboard as that seems to be a much better modem in general

http://www.amazon.com/Motorola-SB6121-SURFboard-DOCSIS-...

bounce some ideas off of me, im really good at many things when it comes to hardware and often give advice on here but when it comes to internet im a bit lost

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Hawkeye22

August 14, 2012 1:13:05 PM

With all those devices, you didn't mention how many TV's you have hooked up. Most times these problems exist because people pick up cheap cable splitters from walmart or radio shack. Each split degrades your signal. The better splitters will boost signals on one side while leaving the other side the same or boost at a different signal strength. The problem is knowing how many db to boost by. You may just want the cable company come out and test all your lines first. They will change out any bad splitters.

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vanwazltoff

August 14, 2012 10:58:26 PM

TVs are separate, i have Directv they use there own cables independent of my Comcast internet service.

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Hawkeye22

August 15, 2012 12:06:51 PM

vanwazltoff said:

in my area comcast is the fastest ISP, 2 of my friends also have comcast but their internet seems to be pretty damn fast. my internet seems to be much slower than theirs and they are both in a 1 block radius away.

Here is something interesting I found out the last time the time-warner tech was out at my place. I always thought the cable internet nodes covered a geographical area, like a 5 - 10 block radius. Appearently this isn't so. They try to alternate homes on a given block, so that even if you are on a node, your next door neigbor's may not be on that same node. Sometime they group homes so that these 3 homes are on node A, the next 3 homes are on node B, the next 3 homes are on node A,... repeat. Anyhow, this can explain why your friend's have better speed than you. Your node may have more people on it, or heavier users. Remember, cable internet is a shared service. You share your bandwidth with any neighbors that are on your node.

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