Frequent Disconnects

Recently, we moved the house's primary computer from the basement to a room upstairs. Everything was fine for a few weeks, but recently, the computer has seen frequent outages of our cable connection. They come at random periods of time and last for random periods of time. Recently, they've been once every couple of hours for 5-10 minutes, however. For the small length outages, the Power, Receive, Send, Online, and Activity lights on the cable modem remain solid. For longer outages, all the lights on the modem short of Power go out. They sequentially turn on with no delays or problems until it gets to the Online light. It will blink for however long, then either go solid and restore my internet, or the lights all go off again. Finally, once or twice I've noticed the Power light go out briefly.

We had a technician from the provider come out. He messed around with the cable lines going into our cable amplifier, saying that sometimes when the cable signal goes through an amplifier, it can "catch interference on it's way back". He re-arranged some of the wires, checked some things on the computer (pinged the computer in DOS prompt, I think?), and said it looked good. The internet was fine for several hours, but went out again eventually.

I've tried making sure every wire is secure and in it's proper place. I've switched out every wire that can be switched out with a different one. Every sort of device manager or status report I know about on the computer says the "Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx Gigabit controller" is working fine. So please, PLEASE tell me it's the cable modem that's messed up. I would really like it to be the cable modem and not the computer.


And if you hadn't noticed, I'm not very computer smart.

This is a wild guess, but you could try updating your modem's firmware. If you don't know what that is then just look around on google or call your ISP. It is the built in "software" that the modem utilizes to connect to your computer and do its work.