A few weeks ago, I grew extremely frustrated with my cable modem connection dropping out on occasion, and revisited the cable splitting approach to some success. However, something didn’t seem right about the speed test I was getting. I’ve been perfectly happy getting download speeds on the order of 5-7 Mb, and upload speeds on the order of 1 Mb.

With all of the hulabaloo on faster home Internet connections lead by the marketing giants at Comcast and Verizon, it left me wondering…

Could I squeeze out more from my home Internet connection?

A look on the back of my aging Toshiba cable modem gave me hope:

That’s a 10Base-T Ethernet interface from the cable modem to the home gateway (currently an Apple AirPort Extreme). Everything else in the home is Gigabit wiring, except for this one link between the home gateway and the cable modem. Could it be that this 10Base-T interface was now my bottleneck in Internet connection speed?

I upgraded to a Motorola SB6120 (with a Gigabit Ethernet interface to my home gateway), and put the unit to the usual speed test.

And check out the result:

That’s an improvement from 8Mb down to 29Mb down, and from 2Mb up to 8 Mb up. WOW! I was honestly shocked that the home network has now outgrown 10Base-T.

Financially, this was actually fortuitous timing; I had recently noticed on my cable modem bill that we were leasing our cable at a cost of $3 per month, and this was increasing to $5 per month in November 2009. Rather than start paying $60 per year to lease the modem, I simply shelled out $85 to buy the new Motorola SB6120 cable modem outright.

For several years now, I have been dealing with ongoing reliability issues with my cable Internet at home. It’s been sufficiently unreliable to notice, but not sufficiently unreliable to distract me from my infinite “MUST DO” list. We’re talking once every other day, I’ll notice that the connection will drop for about 30-45 seconds. Most of the time, I just refresh the browser and continue along my merry way.

My wife does not share this tolerance. She absolutely hates when a site she’s researching doesn’t load. The swirly browser “I’m thinking” icon sits there, taunting her, mocking her, bringing out the most vile of phrases from her mouth. If I were the Internet, I’d be hiding under the bed. For serious.

OK, not really that bad. But she’s quite vocal when it happens. I finally decided to do something about it.

Step 1 - Call Comcast. The friendly technician explained that the status information she was getting from the cable modem pointed toward a bad connection between the modem and the wireless router I used. Two possibilities there… bad router, or bad cable. I had already recently upgraded from an aging Linksys WRT54G to a D-Link DIR-655 Extreme N Wireless Router, so I more or less ruled that out. Cable? Easy enough to swap. Net result? No noticeable problems for a few days, then back to the same routine.

Step 2 - I swapped out the D-Link router for an Apple AirPort Extreme not too much later (not in an attempt to resolve this issue, but for research purposes). Problem stayed. This prompted me to explore further.

Step 3 - Question the wiring leading up to the cable modem. Took a gander in the basement. Can you spot the problem?

That’s an 8-way passive splitter. Each channel being attenuated by -11dB. That works out to each cable coming out of the splitter having less than 8% of the power of the signal that went in to the splitter. This has been this way since I bought the house, and never really paid attention to how the incoming lines were split.

I put a cheap $10 RadioShack 2-way passive splitter (each channel attenuated by -3.5dB, losing roughly 50% of the original signal strength) in front of the 8-way. One of those 2-channels heads straight to the office, the other into the 8-way to be distributed throughout the house.

The result? Too early to tell for reliability. BUT… I happened to run a speed test before and after the modification.

Cable Modem Speed with 8-way Splitter

Cable Modem Speed with 2-way Splitter

That’s an order of magnitude increase in upload speed. Boo-ya-ka-sha.

I spend a fair amount of my time working in my home office. As such, I take the technology investments I make at home pretty seriously; not necessarily in terms of money, or features, or functionality, but in terms of reliability. If I need to count on something working, and it doesn’t, it can easily derail an entire morning or afternoon of productivity.

Battery Backup

The aging battery in the Back-UPS 280 on the left was no longer cutting it for keeping my network up and running when the power occasionally drops out at home. At minimum, I don’t want local network traffic or my hard drive backups over the network getting messed up if the power flickers. With the new unit on the right, I can at least get through a 10 minute outage with minimal impact.

Printers

My print volume at home is relatively low, but what would often happen using an old inkjet printer is that after several weeks of lack of use, to suddenly be expected to fire off 30 or 40 pages at a time would result in clogged print heads, dried ink, stuck gears, etc. Back in 2004, I picked up the LaserJet in the discard pile at CRA in Cambridge, MA, and used it successfully at home for a few years, then at a startup for a few years, until finally it sat idle after the startup closed down, one day hoping that I would find time to get it up and running at home.

Upgrading a 10+ year old inkjet for a 10+ year old laser? Odd, I know. That is, if you’ve never come across the marvelous workhorse that is the HP LaserJet 4M Plus. This thing just doesn’t quit. 281,000 pages printed and counting.

Now we can scratch “new color laser printer” off of the Christmas list, since between the Epson R300 inkjet for photos, and the LaserJet for the basics, we’re covered.

Degraded RAID Array

Our home file server for pictures and music has been running on a degraded RAID 1 configuration for some time now, thanks due to a failed SATA controller. I’ve had the new controller (only $13 on Newegg!) for some time now, but just needed to get it in there and restore the array.

Man, I do love software raid. This truly was as simple as:

1. Power off
2. Install RAID card
3. Hook up second drive
4. Power on
5. mdadm –manage -a /dev/md0 /dev/sdc

From there, it took a few hours to rebuild the array, but now all is well and protected in the event of a hard drive failure on our file server.

Upgrade the DVR wiring for Gigabit

We’re constantly moving large file around the home network, and 100Mbps Fast Ethernet to the DVR was becoming a noticeable factor. Everything supported Gigabit (even the switch in the basement attached to the server farm), except the old wiring. With that upgraded, it’s now Gigabit through and through. Score.

Wireless N for … Wireless N?

Ok, I know what you’re thinking. Either that I’m clueless, or that I’m swimming in enough money to swap out Wireless N routers willie-nillie (which, if you’re a reader of my wife’s blog, you know is not true).

For now, let’s just say that this is an initial foray into Zeroconf networking and Wide-area Bonjour with DynDNS.