Hey all,

Well, not wanting to wait for the cable technicians to take their sweet time getting here, I thought I would turn to this site for some assistance. I have a cable broadband service with Time Warner Cable, and use a Belkin 802.11b wireless router (Model f5d6231-4) so my wife and I can use our laptops to access the Internet as well--my main computer is running Windows XP, by the way.

After some initial cable problems when I first moved into this apartment a couple of years ago, things settled down and more or less worked fine until a month ago or so, when my Internet service began to become erratic--up for an hour, then down for a few minutes while the modem reboots, up for ten minutes, then down for a few minutes while the modem reboots. In each case I would just be going along when the lights would all go solid on the modem, then go off as the modem rebooted.

After calling the tech people they recommended I swamp out my modem for a new one, which I did--I now have a brand spanking new RCA modem. Install, plug in the cable, Internet for a while, and then--hey presto--down goes Frasier. Further calls to the cable company revealed that they can't even find my modem anywhere on their system. Now they said they're going to send out a tech (for next Thursday, despite my screaming and yelling about how a week delay is unacceptable for the money I'm spending), but I'm not at all convinced they are going to know what is going on even when they get here.

Can anyone suggest some possibilities? I consider myself fairly computer savvy, but I'm hardly an engineer, and this on again, off again business (the modem just rebooted again while I was typing this) is incredibly frustrating.

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!

Greg

That, combined with the fact that it has happened with two different modems, almost definitively points to the problem being in the ISP's realm. If you want to narrow things down even further, disconnect your devices from the modem and just let it cook with nothing but the cable coax line and the power plugged into it. See if it still drops off.