Warning, tech talk to follow:

So I was having a few more issues w/ my cable modem connection. I was wondering if there was a way to speed things up because the connection seemed a little slow. I found out there is someone looking at the situation because it's a multi-city wide thing. And it's not really an issue anyway.

Anyway, when looking at how to possibly make the connection faster, I found out about cable modem settings, and what the optimum should be. Each modem has a certain IP you can access in a browser to find out it's info (if you have a Motorola Surfboard modem you can check it by going to http://192.168.100.1). This shows you what the modems settings currently are.

The first thing I found out is I wanted a downstream power level between -12 and +12. Anything below -15 or above +15 will give you quality issues. I had -16. Obviously not good.

The second thing was downstream signal to noise ratio (SNR). The higher the number over 30 the better. I had it at 31.

Then there was the upstream power. The lower the number from 55, the better. Mine was at 51.

So it was ok, but the downstream power really had me worried. I was using a splitter, which I have to use in order to watch cable tv in the loft at the same time as having a net connection. Using a splitter drops -3.5 from the power. It's unfortunately a neccesary evil.

I was also using a thinner coax cable to hide it better. This ran about 30 feet to my desk. Two problems here. One, the longer the cable, the weaker the signal gets, and the less power you end up having. Every 100 feet, I end up losing -5.6 power. Also, as I found out, the cable itself, because it was thinner, gave a weaker signal. When attaching a longer thicker coax, I gained about 5 in power!

But I hated having that big, ugly, hard to bend coax running 30 feet. So what I did was got a shorter coax cable, and bought a longer Cat5 cable to my computer. This not only shortened the span, but also boosted the power in return since I didn't have to run a longer cable.

Thus now I'm getting -9 in downstream power (up from -16), 36 in SNR (up from 31) and upstream power is 42 (down from 51 which is better).

All in all I'm pretty happy w/ the results. My connection should be much more reliable!