Is it possible to live in a bad grid for internet?

[Anonymous]

I've been an Xfinity customer for a couple of decades, my part of my neighborhood is about 30 years old. I've had problems with wifi since wifi started. I've had my router positioned in three different places between my main floor and a back bedroom. At one point until @2010 if my internet went out I could still get it with a cable to the modem. Since @2012 when I lose wifi it's because the modem is down. It doesn't often affect my TV watching, but sometimes it does (screen blanks out, pixelation, can't change the channel get error message). i had the same modem since 2010 until 2015.

Other than Comcast swapping out for the same modem I had the small tower until recently, now I have the black box.

During the pandemic working from home I've had Comcast come out 6 times, 6 different guys who do 6 different things. One suggested I run a new line into my house because maybe my problem is the cables that were run when my house was built. I really don't want a modem sitting in my formal living room, or to pay for another line and the problem didn't get fixed. The last tech in December unhooked and reconnected everything including the connections from the home to the one that comes in from the street to my house; checked the tap.

Everything has worked pretty well, with only a few outages until this month. I'm back to the internet cutting off several times a day for sometimes 15-20 minutes.

Every once in a while if I switch to my work iPhone (verizon), it will drop, then I'll switch to my personal iPhone (AT&T) and it will drop or can't pick up a signal to allow hot spotting.

The crazy thing, and I know there can't be a nexus - is the lawn services and lawn mowers, blowers, trimmers started back up three weeks ago, and they go through November. I'm sure it a coincidence.

Is anyone else experiencing these kinds of problems? Comcast was supposed to come out today, but they are beyond their window and I'm not sure why they haven't showed up. I would really love it if they would just send out the guy who came in December.

[Anonymous]

Where do you live?

[Anonymous]

Is this also happening to your neighbors?

[Anonymous]

We notice that wifi is problematic during storms and windy weather. Also there are glitches during the witching hours - -right when schools let out and early evening. I assume it is a volume surge that has to settle.

[Anonymous]

The question is, is it the internet connection overall, or just wifi. The way to check is most routers have a place to plug directly into them. You can plug your laptopt into that (and turn off wifi on your laptop). If that works when wifi is not, then it's wifi, not the internet.

Wifi can go bad after 5-10 years. You can also get your own wifi router and plug that into the comcast router. They make some that are stronger or with better antennas. For example the Nighthawk line.

[Anonymous]

We’re close to downtown Bethesda and had to buy and install our own router. The Verizon one wasn’t working well.

[Anonymous]

I read through the post and the only reply up to mine that provided good advice is the one at 09:26. That being said, that particular pp missed the fact that you said you lose wifi because the modem is down. If your modem is down, restart the modem and that should resolve the problem because you lost your connection to the ISP for some reason. There could also be frequent cable outages in your neighborhood.

Let me give you a little lesson on cable Internet. With cable Internet, your connection is shared with all the houses in the neighborhood. By this, I do not mean *your* Internet connection but more generally the connection coming into your neighborhood. The more people in your neighborhood that are using Comcast, the slower your Internet speeds will be. I assume since you're on this board that you live in the DMV. If so, there is a good chance that you can get FiOS. If so, you should consider it because that is a direct link to your home and could be much faster although it it usually a little more expensive. .

I don't know the layout of your home but here's the main issues you stated you had over the years.
1. Cable modem goes out. That's obviously going to knock out your cable Internet completely so you need to figure out if this going out is an outage or something wrong on your end (bad modem, bad coax into the house, bad coax in the walls inside the house). Is your coax inside walls or did they drill through the exterior wall to provide you with Internet?
2. Bad WiFi connections. Alright, so there are actually a few things going on here.
2. A. The first you need to know is something a different pp touched on but didn't explain. Water makes WiFi slower. You're going to get slower speeds and shorter WiFi ranges when it rains.
2. B. The second thing is that other microwave sources between your WiFi router and you can slow down the speed. Many people will have a microwave oven between the router and themselves and when the microwave is running it will interfere with speeds (this would obviously be intermittent). https://io9.gizmodo.com/why-does-your-microwave-oven-mess-with-the-wi-fi-connec-1666117933
2. C. The third thing is about barriers - obviously the more walls and the further distance between you and the router, the worse your WiFi will be. If you have coax in your walls (I'm assuming you do since you moved your router a few times), your best solution to this is to get a network extender. If you have ethernet in your walls this will be easy. Since most people do not have Ethernet in the house, I will assume you do not have Ethernet but that you do have coax in your walls. What you're going to want is a MoCA adapter (probably several). You need one between your cable modem and the line coming in so that the adapter can create a MoCA network and share your cable Internet with everyone using your coaxial cables. Next you would need to put another MoCA adapter anywhere you want an Ethernet connection. In your case, you don't need a MoCA adapter if you just want a WiFi extender. You just can buy an Actiontec MoCA adapter for your cable Internet modem and an Actiontec WiFi extender (this has MoCA built in already), they plug and play together. Below are links to products I've used before. You're on cable Internet so you also need a POE filter (FiOS doesn't require this since the fiber connection is not shared by neighbors). A POE filter prevents your MoCA data from leaving your house and going to your neighbor's house. You would place the POE filter at the location where the Internet first enters your house from the line outside. Usually there's an obvious wire coming from the pole or underground where it connects into your house. That's where you will put the filter (just look for it, it's pretty obvious once you actually look). This sounds kind of complicated but it's not that bad. You screw in the filter where the Internet enters your house, you put a MoCA adapter before your cable modem, and you use a MoCA WiFi extender on the other side of your house. Now you have good WiFi everywhere. If you want wired connections you can also add additional MoCA adapters at any location you have a coax connection (you can even use a network switch to provide Ethernet to many devices connected to a TV).

https://www.amazon.com/Actiontec-802-11ac-Extender-Internet-Antennas/dp/B01BV1Y3W2
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B013J7OBUU/ref=twister_B08XVL3GVS?_encoding=UTF8&th=1
https://www.amazon.com/Filter-MoCA-Cable-coaxial-networks/dp/B00KO5KHSQ/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=moca+poe+filter&qid=1620045411&s=electronics&sr=1-3

TLDR: If your modem goes down, restart it. If it doesn't reconnect it's either an outage or a problem on your end. If you want to fix your WiFi issues, learn about MoCA.

[Anonymous]

I'm the pp that posted the long reply with the links and YouTube videos. An alternative would be a WiFi extender using a powerline adapter but those provide poor throughput compared to MoCA which is why I didn't think about mentioning them. I was getting between 20-70 megabit with powerline adapters in my home but with MoCA I could get a minimum of 450 megabit and depending on the setup close to a gigabit. Obviously this doesn't increase your Internet speed outside your house (that connection speed you pay for) but you can certainly maximize the transmission speed within your home which is very important if you have many people on WiFi at once.