Internet Connection Problems

Sometime near the beginning of this week, our internet connection got really slow.  Web pages either wouldn’t load at all, or they’d take 2 or 3 minutes to load.  Sending email took forever.  Uploading data happened at 1-8 KB/s instead of the normal 50 KB/s.

I called the cable company and they said they could detect signal problems getting to our modem.  They said they would be able to send someone out in 2 weeks (!!) but it was likely a problem with a splitter on the coaxial cable: the splitters sometimes go bad and then the signal gets severely degraded.  The idea of a splitter dying sounded ridiculous to me, given that it’s an entirely passive device with no electrical or moving parts, but I figured I’d take the splitter out (thus temporarily disabling the TV’s signal) and connect the cable directly to the cable modem.

Unbelievably, the internet was back to its good old speedy self.  Still in denial, I put the splitter back, but now the internet still worked fine.  So apparently, either the splitter or one of the cables involved has a bad connection or a break somewhere, and moving stuff around must have bumped it back into good contact.  For now I’ll just have to keep an eye on it and maybe go jostle the whole mess around once in a while to see how the signal is affected.