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Originally Posted by mr-b
Over the past few months I have started to experience strange CM "disconnection" problems .... the SNR/upstream power levels look fine as per Robin walker's page ... the Sync/Rdy lights are on but there is no internet connectivity... if I reboot the CM everything works fine again.
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I've been having a very similar problem for the last couple of weeks. Essentially my connection is working perfectly and then intermittently drops. The cable modem still show solid SYNC and RDY lights, but webpages time out or cannot be found and email servers are not reachable. The problem can last for a few seconds or 20+ minutes and then self-rectify.
Talking to NTL on this is VERY frustrating:
Call 1 - Remove your router - that is causing the problem
Call 2 - (Direct connection from CM to PC) - There's definately a problem, Tech Support intermittantly getting 100% loss (not sure what this means?) when interrogating the CM.
Engineer booked to switch out the CM, but actually just changes the power lead/transformer and adds an attenuator to adjust the signal power levels.
Call 3 - Remote test of the connection with PC off shows 0% loss, with PC on this dropped to 100%, "so it must be the PC". (Well, maybe but it is an intermittent connection problem and we certainly haven't done enough testing to conclude this yet!) Next told to disable ZoneAlarm and NAV (which I refuse to do - have you seen the infection rate statistics for unprotected broadband connections?!). Disable ZA and now we have a 10% loss. (Hmm seems to be fluctuating a lot). Follows a confusing conversation where Tech Support trys to tell me that Ad-Aware SE and Spybot S&D are spyware/adware and to disable them because they're maxing out my connection, even though I state that (a) they're not spyware and (b) they're not even running! Finally tech support states that it must be ZoneAlarm hammering my upstream and suggests I contact ZoneLabs - funny how it isn't affecting anyone else then! Just thought - if the problem is spyware, wouldn't the U/S light be continually lit when the problem occurs? (It isn't).
SO, to test the hypothesis that my PC is the problem, I'm typing this on a different PC that doesn't use ZA or NAV. I'm willing to bet a considerable sum that the problem still occurs...!
[I'm not trying to malign the good NTL tech guys, but there are some who talk out of their backsides IMHO.]
Anyone have any suggestions on what the problem might be?
Just for info, here are the SNR levels etc which look okay I think (need to check Robin Walker's site):
Downstream receive power level: fluctuating between -1.84 and -2.01dBmv
Downstream SNR: fluctuating between 30.25 and 31.00 dB
Upstream transmit power level: 40.50dBmv
The error log shows R02.0 No Ranging Response received, T3 time-out with the last occurence about the same time as I last lost the connection.
Any help much appreciated!
