I’ve had cable internet since July in my apartment, shared between 3 of us roommates. The service is through Insight Communications in West Lafayette, Indiana. The connection is shared using a D-Link DI-604 router which is connected to the 3Com 3CR29220 cable modem leased from the cable company.
Till 5 weeks ago, connectivity was normal (i.e. great). Then, on 1 Friday evening, it all went downhill. Sites would take minutes to load. The browser would display “Connecting to www.straightdope.com” for a minute, then maybe “Waiting for www.straightdope.com” and even then there was no guarantee that the page would load. Initially I would powercycle the devices in the following order: switch both modem/router off, wait a minute, power on modem and wait for handshake to get established, power on router. This would be a hit-or-miss affair. Sometimes service would function as earlier, but would detoriate soon enough to the status quo. Other times, there would be no improvement.
When contacted, the cable company said that they were getting “some new equipment” which they were expecting in a couple of weeks. Those couple of weeks passed by without any change. Surprisingly or rather not, my friends across the street enjoyed no hiccups in their service. Upon registering a second complaint, the cable company agreed to send someone over to have a look. With all due respect to that gentleman, I probably knew more about the possible issues than he did. He seemed like a cable TV technician, sent through a cursory crash course in broadband installations. Anyway, he tampered around with the jacks on the wall, checking for signal strength. Having satisfied himself that there was nothing wrong with the signal or modem (I’m not sure how he concluded the latter), he expressed his remorse at our, now strange, connectivity problems. Before he left, he alerted us to the cable hookup in the “boiler closet” where the cable from outside connects to the circuit inside the apartment and advised us that the cable was too close to the metal rods from the boiler and that their proximity to the heat might interfere with the signal. However, in the 5 weeks that we experienced this problem, never did the cable modem lose the signal handshake. Just that the speed was excruciatingly slow to the point of being non-functional.
The visit was yesterday. Since then, I’ve occasionally tampered with the position of the hanging cable in the closet so as to distance it from the rods, but with mixed results, indicating lack of any demonstrable effect of the “heat effect”, perhaps. Googling indicates that the modem I have leased has “polarity problems” with routers and the like and that I may have to buy a polarity adapter to correct that.
But, it’s not clear. Sorry for the long post, but does anyone have any idea, what could be wrong here?