Recently I signed up for the 110Mbps tier. I am an internet only customer taking over an apartment from a previous tenant who had both. I am curious if since I am an early adopter if the network in my area simply can't support that speed, or instead and preferably there might be something wrong locally or at least localized to my complex / street.
I live in a 6 unit condo. My understanding is that a service call about 2 years for the old tenant resulted in RCN running a new line directly from the pole.
I've been running the speed test ( ma.rcn.speedtest.net ) every day at a couple different times, and I can't seem to get it above 20mbps and 1 or 2mbps up. I had one exception where it hit about 35 mbps. And a test immediately after resulted in 20 mbps again.
To troubleshoot, I removed all the splitters I could access inside and to my point of access outside. This actually seemed to increase my forward power from 1 dbmv to 5 db dbmv as reported by the speed test tool, which I assume is a bad thing since the median green is 0.
My readings taken right now are
40.8 dBmv Transmit Power
5 dbmv Forward Power
38.2 dbmv Signal to Noise Ratio
My encoded mac address is 86a625460fdccc9f64b11edc48d057ab7faed58f
I called tech support, to which they reported the only thing they saw was some short period consistent latency spikes, although they didn't / weren't able to elaborate. They plan to send someone out to the area Saturday. I also requested they send me a modem since the plan I've switched to includes a free rental.
I currently am using my own modem, a SB6141. The information and firmware is as listed below. I read on this forum that this firmware may be problematic. At least there was some major bug with bonding fixed in 1.0.8 I believe. Although, bonding looks fine as far as I can tell on the modem info page. I have attached this page.
Below is the information about the firmware. I attempted to ask RCN to upgrade the firmware on the router but was repeatedly told that I need to contact the manufacturer and didn't have much luck, as I expected from other posts here regarding BYOM firmware upgrades on the RCN network being controlled by a mostly not going to happen policy.The logs of the modem mention TFTP retry failed and they can't find the appropriate firmware to download.
Model Name: SB6141
Vendor Name: Motorola
Firmware Name: SB_KOMODO-1.0.6.6-SCM00-NOSH
Boot Version: PSPU-Boot(25CLK) 1.0.12.
Hardware Version: 7.0
Serial Number:
Firmware Build Time: Apr 17 2012 15:09:37
I'm curious if anyone has any ideas of what could be my next step. I'd like to rule out the modem, but I have my doubts that it is the issue. Perhaps one of you have some ideas, or perhaps some of the resident RCN employees could help more thoroughly explore the situation on the company's equipment side of things? I fully understand this is all volunteer and appreciate any and all ideas on how to proceed.
Thanks in advance,
Chris
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