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?
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maybe powerline adapters
Yes. This is true for coax. Due to how coax is wired, every signal goes to every house, just like tv goes to all the houses on the circuit. It’s up to the coax equipment to filter out the signals that aren’t for that connection (just like a cable box is programmed to only allow the channels you pay for).
But the issue is, if a cable isn’t terminated correctly, it looks exactly like an antenna. This will cause noise on the whole coax system and affect everyone on the same circuit.
Uncapped outlets can cause backfeeding, as can damaged cables; when I worked in the field a factory had a damaged coax feed and when one of their machines started up it would knock out the leg. Coax is basically a wireless signal that is stuck on the antenna (wire) rather than a digital signal like Ethernet, and it is a shared medium unlike DSL.
Do you have an antenna on your system or a distribution box?
No
Totally normal. They detected egress and needed to correct it.
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
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.
You are lucky they contacted you. I had comcast just come out and disconnect me at the pole and when I got home and noticed i had no internet had to call for support and have them come by in a few days to reconnect me and also figure out why the other line team disconnected me.
Same thing happened to me, they said my “Internet was leaking”. Replaced two splitters and an old coax cable.
Would amplifiers like the Motorola Cable amplifier cause something like this? Also, what about not using termination caps on non used connections? Answer me!!!
This is very common with spectrum because they’re about to do their high split in which will be expanding uploads to 1gig so they’re going to be utilizing up to 1.2ghz so they’re cleaning up all the ingress in the system
This is normal. Yes, your signal could impact the entire neighborhood and then some. A billion years ago when I worked for an ISP we had to cut people off entirely because they wouldn’t let techs resolve the issue. Completely legal.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coaxial_cable#Signal_leakage
Had this happen and it was a loose connection to my modem. Was also during a solar flare.
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.
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.
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
