Need new a modem and router or combo.

@kuoh The modem keeps cutting out and I have to keep rebooting it (not a comcast problem). When I reboot it is OK for a while but then drops again. I have been on the phone multiple times with comcast and they can find no problem at their end. Despite the lights not working (except when you first turn it on, the power light used to stay on as long as it was on but no longer does that. I don’t care that the lights are malfunctioing) the router works fine.

@Kidsandliz @kuoh I have Comcast (also called XFinity in some areas) and they still let you use your own stuff. I recently upgraded to a “Mesh” system and I have to say it’s pretty good. Mine are from D-Link and you can buy from Costco or other places. You get a set of 2 or 3 or 4. You set up one where your main router was, and then add others around your house which expands your coverage, and supports much higher speed than my original stuff that was also getting flaky. I put one in a remote office, and another in my garage (near the remote office), and now I have good WiFi in my driveway which is handy when I or someone is in a camper outside, and also my car can get software updates over WiFi now. Has been reliable and good and initial setup was not difficult. A set of 3 will be $200-300 usually. A lot of changing features in newer ones but older ones would still work. Lots of promo deals especially this time of year. I think you want something called at least “Wifi 6” which replaced the old letter terms.

A friend at a different place has AT&T Fiber which is good but you have to use their router equipment which is included. If you want to expand to larger area, you can add units they provide, but for an extra $10/month. I don’t think they let you use your own stuff.

There are plusses and minuses of being in a “closed system” like AT&T. In some ways more secure and automatically managed. But then again what “online” is secure?

EDIT by the way I am on Comcast/XFinity “cable” internet and it goes to a remote room by co-ax cable, and I am still using a “model” I have had for many years. That then goes by hardware net to a downstairs area where it’s patched to the new “Mesh” system. So I’m keeping the old model while swapping the problematic single router to a group of new “mesh”-type ones.

@Kidsandliz @kuoh mmm… This might be a ComCast problem they didn’t expect and are pushing it back onto you.

@Kidsandliz @kuoh @pakopako On this topic my older router would “cut out” exactly as you say. Or would connect on 5GHz but not 2GHz band. Sometimes if you cycled power on it, both freqs would work for a while (“Did you try to turn it off and then back on again? – This is the I.T. group we know how to fix things!”) Searching on the net said this was a common issue as some chips got old or overheated in some router brands. So your situation might already be debugged. Unfortunately the router company responded with “we don’t think there’s a problem” in most cases, so you are on your own for that.

Hence why I said “just try the new thing” and so far has been really good. Other than initial cost as I said about $200+ depending on how new and how many mesh hubs.

Looking for a place to recycle a bunch of old routers I’ve built up through the years.

EDIT also new system seems to connect to both 2G and 5GHz bands automatically and you don’t have to pick. As old nerd guy, I really want to know how/why it works. But for now too busy with other life stuff, so if I plug it in and stuff works, I’m actually OK with that!

@Kidsandliz @kuoh In earlier post I typed “modem” but it auto-corrected to “model” if anyone was confused. I re-read my post and went “model what?” or more likely “model what-T-F?”
Got to turn off the auto-correct.

@Kidsandliz The lights not working can sometimes be an indication of a weak or failing power supply. This can also cause the intermittent loss of connectivity as the power dips below minimum requirements. If it uses the typical wall AC adapter, it might be worth taking a look at the output specs and seeing if you can find a close matching one from something else around the house to test. It doesn’t have to be exact, just close to the same voltage and at least the same or higher current.

KuoH

@Kidsandliz @kuoh @pakopako @pmarin

Looking for a place to recycle a bunch of old routers I’ve built up through the years.

Maybe you’ve found one with the OP?

Also, it’s more aptly “auto-corrupt”, not “-correct”.

@kuoh @pakopako @phendrick @pmarin I have unplugged everything and replugged it multiple times (eg kicked the tires) and that usually solves the issue. The problem is the issue is far more frequent now than it used to be (like nearly daily) which makes it a real PITA to do that when I am using it - especially if I am in the middle of a zoom meeting.

@Kidsandliz @kuoh @pakopako @phendrick @pmarin
The suggestion to TRY A DIFFERENT POWER SOURCE is a good one of you can find a suitable match. This will allow you to eliminate that component in the equation…

@f00l Yes it’s getting competitive in some areas. Though a lot of suburban areas don’t have 5G yet, even if near big metro areas. Might also vary by carrier. The provider site will usually be able to check based on your address. Also if you have a recent phone, you can see how well (or IF) it reports 5G service or only the older (usually called LTE) service. It’s true that if you find a service that works for you, the combo deals (net + phone) can make it much more attractive.

I looked into it but at the time needed occasional large amounts of data for work (but I’m now retired). I didn’t need high speed but some of the services place limits that would be fine for a cell phone but not for moving large software releases, or for that matter, if you do console or PC gaming almost all distribution is by download now, and updates 50-100GB are common. So a lot of the 5G services will say that’s too much data 4 U!

@pmarin
I had T-Mobile for a few years.

Actually it was pretty damn good

There were people in the household who did plenty of downloading and they weren’t a sword who wanted the highest of all high speeds, but they were picky about it

And they said it was fine too

Unless somebody is grabbing the entire Internet I can’t imagine it wouldn’t be worth a try if you get reasonable 5G at a given location

Especially at the price

@f00l @pmarin I don’t get 5G here yet that I know of. I’d need to do zoom too as when I have assignments some of them I have to teach over zoom. Grading is all online too so might be using a lot of cellular data. 10G usually did me when I had multiple live zoom classes and live zoom office hours with my hard wired internet so I’d imagine I wouldn’t need more band width than that (well plus a small amount for my phone for phone use).

@f00l @pmarin I can second T-Mobile. When I upgraded my phone last November, they offered it for $15/month. Since I was paying $100/month for Spectrum, it was a no brainer. Speed has been fine and I work remotely. I have even been able to take the modem to my mom’s house since she doesn’t have internet.

@f00l I will weigh in with the observation that when TMobile works right, it’s pretty good. But their tech support is not up to the level of what Sprint provided, and seems inferior to what I could expect from Verizon back when I had service from them. Also, their claim of the largest 5G network may be masking the fact that it can be very spotty in places. We currently have data via 5G at home, but when the contract comes up, I will probably swap back to Xfinity. Fiber does not seem to get as swamped as easily as wireless can, which is hardly surprising. If you live in a high-density location, be aware that the data rates may take a hit when there are a lot of people trying to communicate and access web services at the same time.

@werehatrack

This is not a mobile service it’s intended to be in your home and at intended to work off a wall plug

so spotty service sort of doesn’t matter you just do a quick eval of whether or not you have good 5G in your home and if you do then it’s worth a try

if you don’t, then it’s pointless for you at least until there are more towers in your neighborhood

@Kidsandliz @pmarin

The 5G cellular service I’m talking about is intended for home use and is going to have appropriate bandwidth for that use including data caps

With T-Mobile I was aware of no data caps whatsoever we did as we place and never worried about it even a tiny bit

Furthermore one of the parties was on zoom all the time because he was essentially doing private tutorials using Zoom with people scattered around the country and it was never an issue in terms of bandwidth

What matters is can you get 5G from somebody? That’s a decent signal strength in your building

Since AT&T T-Mobile and Verizon all have different tower configurations it doesn’t matter if one or two of them don’t offer decent 5G

as long as one of them does, and as long as their package that they offer has appeal to you in terms of pricing and no data caps and being sufficiently fast to do zoom and all that sort of stuff

if it Right now I suppose I’d check my carrier to see if I could get 5G and I suppose I’d ask my neighbors to see if any of them had good 5G and I would also check the coverage maps on any wireless provider who offers it to see if my building was in their particular 5G coverage map

if there was 5G coverage in my building from some provider, I was willing to give a chance to then on contract for a month worth of service and see how it went because there are no contracts you can terminate

if I could get decent service with 5G home Internet from one of the providers I consider whether or not it was worth doing my cell phone also on that particular provider in order to get the bundle price discounts

However you may have something better available to you just is so spotty about what’s available where and some people are saying they’re doing OK with starlink so maybe you want to look into that

Anyway the cellular 5G home Internet service from the big providers is not a mobile service and it doesn’t runoff data sharing with your cellular plan. It’s an add-on to your existing service. It’s discounted a few bundle, but mine did come with very good quality and no data caps.

it was good enough that when some of the people no longer live at that location and they moved to other locations they immediately tried to get the same service where they went

And if they couldn’t get good 5G in their new residence, they were thoroughly pissed off about it because it meant they had to go with the cable people, or with AT&T fiber, both of which well the hated dealing with the companies

@f00l @ironcheftoni @pmarin So the modem (thus your service) isn’t “location” bound (eg take it to your mom’s house) it is just “signal” bound (eg anywhere that that carrier has a 5G signal)?

@f00l @Kidsandliz @pmarin correct. On the t-mobile bill it shows up as a second phone number. So you could probably say that it’s basically a hotspot

@f00l

This is not a mobile service it’s intended to be in your home and at intended to work off a wall plug

The box doesn’t care where it is; you can haul it around with you and power it from one of the 110V-capable battery packs if you really want to, and have your own mobile hotspot with whatever (in)security it supports. As has been noted by everyone, the effectiveness is limited by the proximity to a 5G tower and the bandwidth load on that tower. Taking it camping is most likely a waste of time, but it might be worthwhile to haul it along to a motel whose “fast wifi” is running through a low-budget fiber splitting 300Mbps across 130 rooms full of people trying to stream a movie. Of course, a lot of phones can provide hotspot capability, too. Mine can, in theory, but I have yet to use it. OTOH, the S.O. did it regularly when he got tired of the bottlenecks with Xfinity. (We paid for slow service, often got much higher speeds, but sometimes not so much.)

@ironcheftoni @Kidsandliz @pmarin

Yes (can the 5G home internet service be moved around). Technically …Tale the modem anywhere and plug it in

It could be mobile usage (in a car for instance) with the right power accessories.

—-

However we never did this since they were always more than one people using it at home. Nobody got to walk off with it or something.

so I never investigated whether or not this sort of home Internet service that runs on 5G could be moved around and still be within the terms of the contract with the 5G provider

in other words if you take it when you go visit relatives or something I don’t know if your cellular company will be happy with that or not

And I wouldn’t ask them directly because it might be fine, but it might also be against a fine print

I had that sort of question I would probably ask it in an appropriate on Reddit.

or another third-party forum. so that the provider couldn’t directly connect the question to your account and possibly get nasty about you’re moving it around before you’ve had time to determine whether that was going to be OK

Technically speaking, you can unplug the modem and move it

There may also be some technological blocks on this sort of thing, such as if you take the modem too far away from its home location the towers recognized that it’s in a location that’s not authorized, and even though technically the modem would still work the towers are programmed to block it

I don’t have the answer to that part

however if one is doing short trips, one might simply be able to purchase hotspot data that goes with the phone and have that hotspot cover needs on the trip

@Kidsandliz TMobile supplies a box that uses 5G to provide the connectivity to the Net, and it has an internal router with an Ethernet port on the back. as well as providing a wifi hotspot.

@Kidsandliz

The 5G home Internet service device from T-Mobile was a sort of brick about a third of the size of a toaster that plugged into the wall and you put it near a window where you got good signal although in our case, the window aspect wasn’t necessary we could’ve put it anywhere

in our case, the device pad ethernet port in case you wanted to run a single computer or a router connected to it and it also did its own Wi-Fi

we wound up with a complicated configuration, hooking up a router to it and then two sub routers on different subnets and using the native T-Mobile device Wi-Fi only for smart devices. We were toying around with at the time.

we ran our real Wi-Fi connected to our phones or laptops or tablets through the complicated router set up

But if you only have a few devices, say a phone, a computer or two and a tablet you don’t really need a router unless you don’t trust the security of the device and if you do need or want a router, then you only need a simple one

I have an Arris Surfboard DOCSIS3.1 modem I bought a couple of years ago but was never able to use. Every time Xfinity uploaded the config packet to it, the router side bricked and the unit went unresponsive on both ethernet and wifi. From Xfinity’s side, it responded “everything normal, working just peachy” but from our side it became a doorstop when they uploaded that config. Prior to the upload, I could access the admin panel and the internal router worked a treat, but Xfinity refused to talk to it. They said it was the modem, but when two units had identical issues running three different firmwares, I concluded that Xfinity was uploading a broken config and had no clue how to fix it.

Tech support is 177% incompetent at too many places now due to their reliance on an AS-controlled automated script system that never branches to “kick it to Level 3”. It’s not just incapable of solving a problem, it will often add new layers of broken. It’s worse than having your macho boyfriend “fix” the brakes and get the pads in backwards. (This is a repeating issue on Just Rolled In, and I have actually seen one myself now. The level of noncomprehension of basic concepts and inability to simply replicate what is before them is beyond mind-boggling.)

@Kidsandliz

Look at the coverage maps for the big providers to see if you were theoretically within a 5G area

if you are theoretically within a 5G area and your concerns are related to your orientation within the building and to your building construction and the construction of nearby object possibly blocking the signal

Then your first job would probably be to see if your friends have one of the three major carriers, T-Mobile Verizon or AT&T and invite them over and see what kind of signal strength they get on their phones

that’s the simplest and most reliable test other than just getting one of these bricks and giving it a try

(we used to call ours “the brick”. we also had plenty of bricked items around the house so it could get confusing)

I believe that some of these carriers have grace periods where you can try it in your home and if you’re not happy with what you’re getting if you return the device within a few days and cancel the service then they don’t charge you anything?

I’m not sure. I think they did that in the beginning because nobody knows for sure what will work in their residence until they give it a try.

so you might check to see if any of them offer that

Also check to see exactly who the upstream carrier is from your mobile service. It is buying its data capacity from somebody.

Also understand that one of the reasons these devices are much larger than a cell phone is that they have better antenna capacity within the device and more power, which means that they can make more of a given signal than a cell phone can

And if your cell phone is not new, it won’t be as powerful anyway

so the best way to find out is to simply get your hands on one and tested if the company will let you do it with a grace period

if you find that one of them will work or possibly might work and you wanna try it for a month or so and see how it goes

Possibly don’t change your cell service over right away because you want to be sure that you’re happy with the home Internet service you get from the 5G device

And you also want to make sure that whatever bundles are being offered to lower a combined cell and home Internet service with discounts are actually worth changing your cell carrier over

the discounts might be worth it or they might not be but the first thing that is to figure out if it works

The way these devices are designed. You have a good chance of getting far better reception from one of these devices than you would from just a cell phone.

if the device is kind of work in your location, the company providing it might even have extender antennas or they might not you just have to ask but the device plus an extender antenna might actually be able to pick up something quite powerful in terms of signal strength