odeon's ask away-thread

[DirtDawg]

Thanks for the heads-up, O-Man!

I am fairly sure that I could also benefit by completely replacing the lines to a higher grade, along with the quality of splitters that the company used during the last install. Maybe I should have them come out and check their lines which service my house. Bummed, I am, to think I am missing almost a quarter of my upload speed.

My next order will be to have the cable company come out and test my line, as soon as I get a new all-in-one cable modem router combo.

I can get a decent price on a Motorola or a Netgear.

It seems as if you recommend the Netgear product. Is that correct?

[odeon]

Actually I don't recommend Netgear because the hardware is a bit too sensitive to heat, meaning that a Netgear will age significantly in a relatively short time. I'd buy a Draytek, something like the 2820n. They are of much higher quality. The price is higher, too, but you get a lot of bells and whistles for your money.

Motorolas I have no experience of but Cnet seems to dislike them. I'd find out who makes the actual components and go from there--I know that Linksys and Netgear share some of theirs.

As for the lines, you can achieve a lot simply by making sure that any connectors and sockets are OK. Some may need replacing or soldering.

For the exact maximum up speed, check with your ISP. It could well be 1Mbps.

[DirtDawg]

Actually I don't recommend Netgear because the hardware is a bit too sensitive to heat, meaning that a Netgear will age significantly in a relatively short time. I'd buy a Draytek, something like the 2820n. They are of much higher quality. The price is higher, too, but you get a lot of bells and whistles for your money.

Motorolas I have no experience of but Cnet seems to dislike them. I'd find out who makes the actual components and go from there--I know that Linksys and Netgear share some of theirs.

As for the lines, you can achieve a lot simply by making sure that any connectors and sockets are OK. Some may need replacing or soldering.

For the exact maximum up speed, check with your ISP. It could well be 1Mbps.

I learned from another guy today, that, because of the fact that my cable run is so far from the pole ( about eighty feet or twenty five meters ), I am already pushing the limits of RG6 (basically, I have twenty something year old cable underground, which has never been updated to a modern standard), due to my cable service being buried underground (is he correct?). He insists that I should be running RG11 from the pole to my house, just to start with, but all my splitters and connections are also to suspected in the search for the best speed.


I do not have a source for Draytek gear, but I found them online, just fine. I will certainly explore further.

[odeon]

I *think* he is probably right but I don't have any numbers. RG11 will have lower loss of signal, in any case, but as the diameter is larger, you could experience other problems.

[DirtDawg]

I *think* he is probably right but I don't have any numbers. RG11 will have lower loss of signal, in any case, but as the diameter is larger, you could experience other problems.

Such as skin effect?

The cable I looked at today  was in the ballpark of three hundred dollars for the runs I need to re-cable the entire house with RG11.

There is a buried conduit, about three inches diameter in my back yard. Feeding a new cable through that conduit should prove fairly straight forward, I would hope.


What are your concerns. (mine are mechanical, but then I am just learning about this stuff)

[odeon]

I was thinking about what a thicker cable does to the signal. I don't know enough of these things, tbh. School was a long time ago.

[DirtDawg]

I was thinking about what a thicker cable does to the signal. I don't know enough of these things, tbh. School was a long time ago.

I am not so worried about skin effect as some are. To me it seems as if skin effect is mostly an horror in the transmitting of "higher frequency" signals, such as radio or worse, video, in the analog realm. I still have to find if the larger cable can actually contribute to a significant loss when it is mainly digital media passing down a line that is already nearly saturated with other specific digital media. 

I need to look into this some more.

This is why they sell such expensive cables which have silver plated conductors and teflon insulators, you know. They are fighting against the property of the signal being radially dispersed in phase due to cable gauge. Phase integrity is essential in a transmission line where data must be kept within a certain range of phase differential before distortion and losses add up to a substantial portion of the total signal. Honestly, I may need to find out more, but at eighty feet, before I even separate the cabling into the spaghetti that goes to all my stuff, I can not see how RG11 is itself a problem.

Your instinct that the cable company used shitty splitters (and I know for a fact that they did not install a single amplifier in the entire system) and connectors has me really thinking, though.

[odeon]

Splitters and connectors would be on the top of my list. An ADSL signal is easy to disrupt.

Do you get timeouts or do you simply have a low speed?

[DirtDawg]

An occasional time out is what made me jump into worrying about it all.

When my new (docsis3 capable) modem began to reset about every ten minutes, I knew something must be terribly wrong.

[odeon]

The your problem will most likely by hardware-related but you could try lowering the MTU a bit.

[earthboundmisfit]

When are you going to start a thread on your new Jag?

[odeon]

Oops. I forgot.

I'll try to remember when I get back home.

[Osensitive1]

Thought Callaway was back but since she's not, might as well ask you too. Has something changed with the status for new members?

thats an odd status under your name

"one"

hmm...

Yes, good catch; usually it says, rookie be kind to me.

Just looked at the member list and members with zero post have zero status, and 1-9 posts have one status, and 10 post have rookie be kind to me. Something must have changed.

Jack has the never ending question of why.

[odeon]

Yes, I made two separate groups to locate the older zero-post members. I should have removed them but I forgot.

[Osensitive1]

Thanks, Odeon.