new comcast customer - no upstream bw

slew · Post by **slew** » Fri Jan 25, 2002 8:54 pm

I've been a satisfied user of @home service through my Comcast cable provider here in Howard Co Md for several years. On 1/12, Comcast became my ISP as well, while retaining my@home mail server account. At about that date, I began experiencing a bizzare problem, and comcast hasn't made a dent in it.

If I try to send email with an attachment larger than about 8 KB, the following sequence occurs:
1. The sending of the email appears to hang. The pop-up Outlook Explorer box indicates that sending is in progress, but the blue sliding bar comes quickly to a stop
2. After 67 seconds, plus/minus 3, the "cable" light on my Toshiba cable modem blinks off, on, off, on at about three seconds per cycle. It then flashes quickly a couple of times and comes back on solid.
3. Just after the light comes back to stay, the Outlook Express pop-up informs me that my connection has been terminated by the server.

If I have set my time-out in Outlook Express to 30 seconds, I will get a pop-up in 30 seconds telling me that my SMTP server is not responding and asking if I want to wait or stop.

This isn't just a mail server problem. I get the same cable-light action at 67 seconds after initiating an upload of a >8Kbit file to a web site (ofoto.com, for example).

Comcast has "escalated" this from tier 2 service, making it a certified outage. That hasn't yielded any result after 5 days. My neighbor down the street has had no such problem. Any suggestions out there? Tests of downstream bandwidth show no problem -- regularly getting near T1 speeds. The one test I found that would also check upstream speed (http://speedtest.inch.com) seemed to indicate in verbose mode that my machine was sending one bit up at a time.

rodrod5 · Post by **rodrod5** » Sat Jan 26, 2002 12:17 am

more than likely you have RF noise that is interfearing with the upstream channel

you need to have tier2 put a tool called matrix on it or whatever they have like matrix if they dont have it

they can look at the signal to noise ratio and other modem info to see what the issue is

if you friend is in the very near vicinity and does not have the same issue then it would indicate an issue between YOU and the mail server to me

do you have cable tv if so any fuzziness on the low 2-13 channels?

an escalation will more than likely NOT solve this issue and infact there are VERY SPECIFIC issues that get escalated with VERY SPECIFIC documentation for the issue and i do not believe this issue was one on the list of escalateable issues

therealcableguy · Post by **therealcableguy** » Sat Jan 26, 2002 8:03 am

The problem is with your Toshiba modem. It appears to be happening with other cable companies also. I know at Comcast we are experiencing it at many systems. The techs swap out the modem(with a different manufacturer) and everything works fine.By the way,it seems that many of the Toshiba's have the problem but not all of them.One of my techs has a Toshiba(same model as the problem child)and hers has not nutted up once.Have them swap out the modem and all will be well.

slew · Post by **slew** » Wed Jan 30, 2002 7:49 pm

TheCableGuy was right on the money. I finally got to a local Comcast person who knew about the modem problem and they replaced it with an RCA. Uploads now running 128K.

Cable_Dood · Post by **Cable_Dood** » Wed Jan 30, 2002 8:42 pm

We haven't experienced that problem with the Toshiba in our market. Have you guys seen this with the Surfing Machines or Com21 dp111s, which are clones of the Toshiba?

--Cable_doOd

therealcableguy · Post by **therealcableguy** » Thu Jan 31, 2002 8:56 pm

Cable_Dood,
We have only seen it with the Toshiba's. We'll keep an eye out on the Surfboards and Com21's.Thanx for the headsup!

Indy · Post by **Indy** » Fri Feb 01, 2002 12:31 am

Originally posted by Cable_Dood
We haven't experienced that problem with the Toshiba in our market. Have you guys seen this with the Surfing Machines or Com21 dp111s, which are clones of the Toshiba?

--Cable_doOd

Only on the Toshiba 1000s (301 series serial numbers...) been fighting to convince our management that there's a problem with them...I replaced 4 of them in the last 2 days...