8 ms·
Unfortunately while 192.168.100.1 as a diagnostic web interface was reliable for many years, more recently a lot of cable companies have been locking down even
by wolrah 3y ago
Unfortunately while 192.168.100.1 as a diagnostic web interface was reliable for many years, more recently a lot of cable companies have been locking down even these read-only interfaces preventing users from accessing useful data about signal strength.
A few years ago I had a similar problem with Armstrong Cable in NE Ohio and went through a similar process that involved multiple unhelpful tech visits eventually culminating in me writing a scraper to read the diagnostic page and collect SNR/Tx power/BER stats per channel plus some investigation with a SDR to prove that the two channels having severe problems overlapped with one of the frequencies used by a nearby AT&T tower, and that I never had problems when I wasn't attached to one of those channels.
After all that they did some kind of RF leakage test and found that chipmunks had been chewing on the RG6 line from the street so that got replaced with the big thick orange cable and all was well for the rest of the time I lived there.
About three months later they pushed an update to their modems that changed the seed used for generating the random password that "protects" the advanced diagnostics page from the default so neither I nor anyone else on their network could access it anymore without inside information.
They went out of their way to take objectively useful diagnostic information away from us. A pure evil move, but of course one they could do with impunity because most of Armstrong's service area their only competition is Frontier's ex-Verizon DSL which was hot garbage 20 years ago and has only deteriorated since then. No one who would ever care about that feature is going to change providers over it going away, the sad state of the US broadband market means they have no real choice.
- tguvot 3y agothere is actually rg6 cables with special shielding to protect from LTE frequencies
- alyandon 3y agoCable ISP here locally has gone as far as to entirely remove access to the 196.168.100.1 diagnostic page. I can't even tell if my modem is properly synced with the network or not now. :-/
- sidewndr46 3y agoThus solving the problem, forever!
- JohnFen 3y agoCan't you buy your own cable modem and use that?
- Filligree 3y agoI keep seeing references to this from Americans, but is this actually a thing? There’s no way my ISP would allow me to connect a device that isn’t owned by them.
- zwieback 3y agoYes, you can go to an office supply store and pick one up, use a webpage or phone call to hook it up to your ISP, generally.
- karaterobot 3y agoDefinitely! Comcast charges $5-10 a month to rent a cable modem, so buying your own pays off pretty quick.
- Filligree 3y agoThey do what now? I've never heard of an ISP charging for their own equipment.
- JohnFen 3y agoYes, they do. Further, my experience with Comcast specifically is that every three months, they "forget" that I don't rent a modem from them and just start charging me the rental fee anyway. Then I have to call them up to tell them to remove the charges and stop adding new ones.
- karaterobot 3y agoWhen Americans complain about Comcast, it's not a meme, they are actually an awful company. But for the record: If you just sign up for Comcast (XFinity, whatever) and use the internet, you are renting a modem/router combo from them for about $10 a month, in perpetuity. You can buy an off the shelf modem/router for a couple hundred bucks, and use that instead. It'll pay off in a year or two. You have to call Comcast up and activate the device, but it's otherwise a completely painless process.
- coretx 3y agoAncient PCI TV tuner cards can be abused for diagnostics. Nothing your ISP can do about it. ;-)