My ISP is cable. Called and said they needed in my house to find the source of the signal that was affecting everyone else in my neighborhood. Literally nothing had changed and my house has been connected since 2010.

The tech arrived and I had them start outside. He replaced every connection/coupling and kept testing. After all of them were replaced, his testing machine showed a perfect signal. Noise eliminated. I was not charged for this service.

I found this baffling. My neighbor’s coax connections affect me?

  • Great-University-956@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    Same thing happened to me,
    But the noise was intermittent 2 minutes every 10 or so. It was upstream channels, so tech suspected it was someones modem failing.

    No way to find out who’s modem without shutting them down in groups in process of elimnation.

    Took about 2 days and my upload was eventually returned from 100k back to 10mb

  • Ok-Tangelo4024@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    I work at an ISP and we have guys doing this constantly. It’s not always at a customers house but yeah. A fault on the cable going to your house causes your modem to increase the power it uses to talk to the node in your neighborhood that connects back to the ISP. If your modem uses too much power and drowns out the signals from your neighbors going to the same node, then everyone else’s service can suffer and yours is just fine. It’s weird but that’s how it is.

    A connector might have gotten rusted or a landscaper might have nicked a cable with a weed Wacker or something.

  • rotearc@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    I had cable internet for about 9 years, no issues at all, one day the isp truck came by and disconnected my connection at the street pole end without any warning. ISP said my connection the cause of the signal interference to my neighborhood cable internet issue. The tech tested the cable from the street pole to my house demarc. The connector at the street pole end is rusted and there were sign of water get into the cable and turned the cable into an antenna. They ran a new cable replaced that segment. Everything was okay since. I switched over to fiber now.

  • bradsour@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    I’ve previously reported an issue to my ISP and it turned out to be loose cables and unterminated cables. Once that was taken care of all was well again. So now every once in a while I check the tightness. I find it amazing they can even loosen up, but they do just from minor jostling of boxes.

  • Pandamonium108@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    I had this same thing happen to me for the first time a few months ago. It was my fault because I had done some changing and it was just a not fully right cable connection in my basement. They had been going up the line to each house to isolate to noise my connection was feeding back in.

  • bippy_b@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    If you have any MoCA adapters and you don’t have a filter on your house… you might be sending that info out over the wire. I had that happen once… using MoCA adapters. Cable guy calls me and says I am putting out “stuff” into the system. I happened to be on vacation at the time… told him I would be back next week… I added an adapter inside my attic before the coax went out to the neighborhood and asked them to check again… they never responded and never came back.

    Then years later (maybe 1 year ago) when a guy came over to re-run my line out to the box (I think neighbors lawn people cut it)… he slapped a MoCA filter into the connection box and said they were standard/required now. So I was able to remove the one in the attic.

  • Dirty_Butler@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    This is 90% of my job every day. Something in your house is acting like an antenna and interfering with the return path. Most of the time it’s a loose connector behind the modem but any bad connection can cause it. I usually track the noise to a house and use a filter at the tap that blocks the noise and leaves the sub online, then create a job to get an tech in the house

    • Saint_Subtle@alien.topB
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      10 months ago

      Can confirm this, former signal engineer for the first cable internet provider and a ham. Bad connections, unmatched RG-8, and trashed filters were the bane of my existence. That and crappy installers. Thank the deities for QoS.

  • cosmicsans@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    I had this happen a few months ago. They weren’t nice enough to call, they just trapped my line and shut off my internet for up to 2 days while I had to wait for a tech to come.

    First time they needed to replace the line from the box to the house. After that they couldn’t find what was wrong but they shut it off like 2 more times :(

    • Whipitreelgud@alien.topOPB
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      10 months ago

      Everyone at my ISP was very helpful, and this episode made me realize how well they handled this.