About 4 months ago I started getting wide swings in both DS and US power levels, with the DS moving up to 4 points on a single channel within a few minutes (constantly throughout the day) and US spiking to 57 and above causing loss of bonding. I reported this to mediacom, but after waiting 4 weeks for them to install a new drop (even though that had not been identified as the cause) I finally removed a splitter losing access to yet another outlet in my house to keep the upstream from going out of range and having a complete loss of service. The drop was eventually replaced, but the signal swings still continue to happen.
Today I installed a Netgear CM500 to go from 8 to 16 DS in the hopes it would make my service a little more reliable since I have gotten nowhere trying to get mediacom to fix this 4 month old signal issue. I hadn't checked signals in a bit, and noticed that my DS were back up to 8-9 on about half the channels with the rest sitting at 2-4 (still moving all over the place literally every few seconds). Having had this issue yearly with needing to knock down the DS power due to amps on our road never working right, I added a 6db loss connector to bring them closer to optimal, they were then at -2 to +4. Prior to that my US was at 38/42/42, this brought it to 47.3/50.3/50.3, high but still in range. Well now here we are a few hours later and the DS have already climbed back up to -0.2 to 4.5, US fairly constant at 47/50.3/50.3.
Here are the levels now:
Downstream Bonded Channels
Channel Lock Status Modulation Channel ID Frequency Power SNR Correctables Uncorrectables
1 Locked QAM256 16 213000000 Hz -0.3 dBmV 39.5 dB 16 0
2 Locked QAM256 2 117000000 Hz 4.5 dBmV 43.8 dB 0 0
3 Locked QAM256 3 123000000 Hz 4.5 dBmV 44 dB 0 0
4 Locked QAM256 4 129000000 Hz 4.3 dBmV 43.8 dB 0 0
5 Locked QAM256 5 147000000 Hz 3.5 dBmV 43.3 dB 98 250
6 Locked QAM256 6 153000000 Hz 3.1 dBmV 43.1 dB 90 154
7 Locked QAM256 7 159000000 Hz 2.6 dBmV 43.1 dB 64 33
8 Locked QAM256 8 165000000 Hz 2.2 dBmV 42.4 dB 27 0
9 Locked QAM256 9 171000000 Hz 1.7 dBmV 42.1 dB 0 0
10 Locked QAM256 10 177000000 Hz 1.3 dBmV 41.9 dB 0 0
11 Locked QAM256 11 183000000 Hz 1.1 dBmV 41.6 dB 0 0
12 Locked QAM256 12 189000000 Hz 1.2 dBmV 42.4 dB 0 0
13 Locked QAM256 13 195000000 Hz 0.9 dBmV 41.4 dB 123 261
14 Locked QAM256 14 201000000 Hz 0.5 dBmV 41.8 dB 86 223
15 Locked QAM256 15 207000000 Hz 0.2 dBmV 41.4 dB 15 24
16 Locked QAM256 1 111000000 Hz 4.5 dBmV 43.5 dB 36 30
Upstream Bonded Channels
Channel Lock Status US Channel Type Channel ID Symbol Rate Frequency Power
1 Locked ATDMA 1 5120 Ksym/sec 35750000 Hz 50.3 dBmV
2 Locked ATDMA 2 5120 Ksym/sec 28250000 Hz 50.3 dBmV
3 Locked ATDMA 3 5120 Ksym/sec 20750000 Hz 47 dBmV
So my question is this - is a 4 point difference in DS power levels across the channels going to cause any issues? If the US starts spiking again I will have to remove the 6db filter which will throw the DS back out of range on 6 or 7 of the channels depending on where they are floating at that particular moment. I'm not sure what else I can do to get mediacom to address the constantly moving DS power...I expect it to move, thats natural in a plant, but a 4 point move in just minutes is not normal and that is the only thing I can identify that causes the very brief blips we see in throughput loss. Modem does not throw errors, lights don't change...all throughput just stops for a few seconds then goes back to normal. I can run a speedtest and get 125/16 and run it again a minute later and it won't complete due to the blip or will show a brief canyon where the blip occurred and finish around 80-90. They already had a tech here who verified it was not anything local, but did go ahead and have the drop replaced anyway. That tech also said he was putting in a maintenance job to fix the US channels (they were about 6 dBmV apart) and it seems to be better avg around 3 points now.
Any suggestions or observations would be appreciated on how I can get them to address this, or regarding the signal spreads.
Thanks
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