Robert Accettura's Fun With Wordage » cable modem http://robert.accettura.com Robert Accettura's Personal Blog on Web Development and Tech Thu, 09 Feb 2012 01:43:47 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Cable Modem Power Level Graphing http://robert.accettura.com/blog/2008/05/26/cable-modem-power-level-graphing/ http://robert.accettura.com/blog/2008/05/26/cable-modem-power-level-graphing/#comments Tue, 27 May 2008 01:35:00 +0000 Robert http://robert.accettura.com/?p=1755 Continue reading →]]> As I hinted last week, I graph a fair amount of data, since I find it pretty handy at times, not to mention just interesting to see in a pretty graph form. I’ve been doing this for years and it’s served me well.

One thing I really wanted to get going was monitoring the cable modem’s power levels. This is now implemented:

Cable Modem Power Levels

How pretty is that? I also moved my ping/latency graphs away from MRTG to RRDTool based graphs. Next up is interface traffic (when I get around to figuring out why it didn’t work when I just tried it).

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]]> http://robert.accettura.com/blog/2008/05/26/cable-modem-power-level-graphing/feed/ 1 Poor Broadband Performance http://robert.accettura.com/blog/2008/05/17/poor-broadband-performance/ http://robert.accettura.com/blog/2008/05/17/poor-broadband-performance/#comments Sun, 18 May 2008 02:44:40 +0000 Robert http://robert.accettura.com/?p=1743 Continue reading →]]> For the past several weeks, the cable modem has been getting more and more unstable. Having dealt with this before I knew the signal quality was pretty poor from looking at the stats. By using a different line that goes more direct, it made a real difference as the data below shows (sidenote: I need to start tracking this using RRDtool).

Before

Forward Path:
Signal Acquired at 723.000 MHz
SNR: 27.1 dB
Received Signal Strength: -19.4 dBmV
Bit Error Rate: 0.459 %
Modulation: 256 QAM

Return Path:
Connection: Acquired
Frequency: 31.6 MHz
Power Level: 61.0 dBmV
Channel ID: 4
Modulation: 16 QAM

After

Forward Path:
Signal Acquired at 723.000 MHz
SNR: 37.1 dB
Received Signal Strength: -6.9 dBmV
Bit Error Rate: 0.000 %
Modulation: 256 QAM 

Return Path:
Connection: Acquired
Frequency: 31.6 MHz
Power Level: 49.8 dBmV
Channel ID: 4
Modulation: 16 QAM

The performance before was getting pretty bad (never more than 10Mbps, often below 4Mbps). Just ran another test and got this:

Comcast Speed

You can see the packet loss was at 100% for several hours yesterday, and was even when up the connection was pretty poor. Around 3:00 it was disconnected while they fixed the coax hookup. You can see the clean connection afterward, with only one small hiccup while I made a little adjustment to the networking cabling that resulted in a few minutes down.
Packet Loss

Pings to this server are still a little high after the tornado incident due to some weird routing on Comcast’s part. Not sure when will get resolved.

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