We get reaquainted with
cable company internet service.

The last time we updated our network “gumshoe engineering” efforts we had installed the powerline carrier AV2000 devices to cover the far reaches of our house with relatively good speed. We promised to give our older powerline adapter network boxes to a friend who lives in a house with an interior, mostly decorative, brick wall that acts like a total stop to WiFi. The difficult crawl space / attic runs in this house make either powerline or MoCA the go-to choice.

When we arrived at this house we installed the old Linksys powerline wall boxes and they worked! On a 200Mbps down and 10Mbps up cable drop the Linksys boxes deliver 27Mbps down and 10Mbps up to the other side of the wall. Not great, but far better than the 0 to 1 Mbps signal from WiFi there. These old Linksys AV standard units are 8 to 10 years old, they use two blade plugs so they work in older houses that only have two blade sorts of sockets. The newer AV2 standard units use three prong plugs only, so they can generally jump legs or phases in house wiring, and achieve much higher speeds. There are two IC makers supplying the chipsets for powerline AV and AV2 standard units, Broadcom and Qualcomm. The claim is that they are all compatible, but in practice if you buy a starter set from one brand, it is wise to stay with that brand if you add on nodes to your network. There is yet a different standard called G.hn based on the UN telecomm group, not the IEEE group. Only Marvell supplies chips for this standard, and Zyxel seems to be the only brand making these units. They are -not- compatible with the IEEE 802, AV2 standard. MoCA is the alternate standard for penetrating brick/block walls, dense floor levels, or plaster lath walls. It uses cable TV coax and occupies the frequencies used by satellite TV block converters. We have discussed all this in earlier chapters of this story, our new encounter here is with Xfinity / Comcast cable internet and Mesh Wifi. If or when a lot more speed beyond the wall is needed in this house, the powerline will not deliver on this older two prong system, the homeowner will need to investigate a MoCA or install Ethernet through the attic.

Technicolor is the name on the box from Xfinity, it’s a brand we associate with movies. Anyway, this box is a gateway - that is - a combined modem and router that also has RJ 11 output jacks for plain old telephone services (POTS). We asked to see the cable bill, assuming there must be a rental fee of some sort. There is, it’s $14.00 / month. A quick check on the xfinity.com site for allowed retail units shows us an Arris (formerly Motorola) 8200 that will handle up to 2Gbps. A few places sell these and the cost is ~$150.00, or roughly an 11 month payback. That seems like the winning deal, anything that has specs that fast shouldn’t be obsolete anytime soon, but we should check what we might lose by ditching the Technicolor box.

A gateway has a router built in, but on this Comcast box we find a first generation Google / Nest Mesh Wifi system, 1st generation, has been added on because of dissatisfaction with the WiFi performance of the Xfinity box. This setup is probably doing something called double NAT, which is not good. A network address translation - or NAT - function operates something like a letter box in a large apartment building. Without NAT, anyone can send mail to any address in the outside world but it’s sent with only a street address, the name and apt. # are omitted. When return mail arrives with those omissions, we have a problem. To avoid confusion we have a NAT to make sure the name and apt. # are on all packets sent and received, kind of like our own postmaster. The problem here is this system has two postmasters — the Google Mesh and the Technicolor systems. Sooner or later this is going to cause a problem, it is going to have lost packets, undelivered mail, slow or simply dropped connections as one postmaster steps on the other’s toes. Everyone on the inside of a network (the outside being the internet) needs to be easy to accurately locate. Any duplicate addresses or incomplete addresses will cause some chaos on the network.

The Google Mesh router gives great speed, in various locations it will yield 80 to 90% of the speed available from a wired connection at the router. The Technicolor box has no antenna, and no 5GHz band (the faster band) for WiFi. We read more info on the Technicolor and find that it also shares a portion of our WiFi signal with anybody who happens to pass by. That’s the Comcast Hotspot network. We learn that there are ‘tricks’ that can be done to use this extra public signal in combination with the existing signal to boost performance. We have not read the terms and conditions that come bundled with the Comcast service agreement to know if this combining is acceptable, but the resident here does take umbrage at the idea of purchasing a service from a provider who then turns around and sells part of that same service to someone else. Combined with security concerns and the quick payback for buying a modem, that ices the deal. Ordering a new modem and returning this thing to Comcast is the homeowner’s preference. We agree. Wiring directly from new purchased modem to Google router solves the double NAT problem.

This Mesh router is interesting. We used the phone app for it to fine tune the position of the three white ‘pucks’ that relay signals. There is a signal ‘goes-in-it’ and a signal ‘goes-out-it’ ethernet connector plus a DC power feed on each box. Simply poking around with our speed measurement app reveals an odd thing, though — the goes-out ethernet connector of each box gives about half the speed of the Wifi output on the same ‘puck’. We’ll need to research this and have some ideas ready to try when we come back to help with the install of the new Arris cable modem box. We have already checked, the only alternative / competition at this address is the DSL offering from the telephone company. That is the same stuff they offered twenty years ago. Their DSL plan offers up to 50Mbps down and 10Mbps up, actually it doesn’t go that fast, as DSL speeds are distance sensitive. This plan is roughly $50/mo including their modem rental fee of $10/mo. In 10 to 15 percent of the area of Germantown, they offer fiber that runs at just shy of 1 gigabit per second. The price tag is $49/mo plus $10 for the gateway, but that looks like a gimmicky offer, lots of hoops and conditions, we imagine it will get to be $80 or a bit more for all in pricing.

Our experience having had Dial-up and ISDN and DSL and Cable and now Fiber over the years is that given the alternative and even for a premium price we would always click the buy button for Fiber. It is very reliable, it has no time of day slow / congestion periods like cable. Cable speeds drop off markedly when all your neighbors go online after dinner, you are effectively sharing a system. Most of all, though, Fiber offers relatively symmetrical speeds - meaning the uploads are nearly as fast as the downloads. That is becoming a way more important now that our houses are far more than entertainment consumption. Yet Fiber is only available for 10 to 15 percent of Memphis burbs houses, while cable serves nearly 100%.

How much internet speed do we really need?

Online gamers were way ahead of the rest of us on this one. They have known for years that good upload speed is as important as download speed for good performance. The internet service providers saw it differently, for obvious reasons. Let’s say they had six lanes of highway, three north bound, three south bound. They forecast the great majority of their traffic will go south, delivering to households, only a small bit will be households sending information. They started out specifying the lanes so as to allocate more lanes to the south bound traffic, those that were delivering entertainment. Their plan now has roughly 5 lines going south, and 1 lane going north. The result is faster deliveries, and gee-whizz product speed claims for data consumers, while leaving the narrowest possible bandwidth for what we produce to send back.

These standards were made long ago, they are now very difficult to change. There is a DOCSIS 4.0 cable standard coming which promises multi-gigabit speeds with fast uploads, but that won't help us this Fall. We have already changed the way we work and produce. We make our own videos now and stream them out to the world when we do video conferencing, as well as produce large documents or images at home. We need a bigger outbound freeway from the den now that we do not leave the house to go to the office or classroom. Fiber doesn’t have that problem. The rainbow of light plays with many more lanes than the ~50 to ~600 or even 1200 MHz radio signals of cable, so it has far more potential. More available freeway lanes, to use our analogy, means the phone company can offer far faster upload speeds, meaning an all fiber participant Zoom conference can proceed with more people and smoother performance than an all cable limited upload ability would allow. Remember, the performance of any network is limited by its slowest sections, its largest bottlenecks. Fiber gives us fewer bottlenecks than any competing means. This is a system design difference, it has little to do with how good or bad Xfinity might be at anything, nor does the lack of support from the phone company, as long as their system operates reliably.

The duopoly of the cable and the phone company are unlikely to move rapidly. They are granted their franchise by our local governments. They can make persuasive cases regarding the cost to finish the fiber build-out, and the substantial investment in DOCSIS 3.x cable equipment that is far from the end of its useful life. Yet we read that in some areas the COVID era internet usage has spiked to 60% more than even the pre-COVID Saturday night at the Netflix movies period that was the previous max stress point. The world may have seen a tipping point in these past six months, cheap gasoline, low traffic highways, but conjested internet pipes. We doubt if things ever fully bounce back to status quo ante COVID.

Meantime, we have a few days before the modem is delivered to noodle out a strategy for the Google mesh system our friend has. So we headed home to do more research and get a start on producing what we hope will be the final chapter of our booklet here, having solved all the problems of home networking (notice the dripping sarcasm).

We use SpeedTest apps by Ookla. You may have a different preference, but remember to use the same test consistently - make apples-to-apples comparisons.

Exploring the magic of mesh WiFi - good gains for minimal effort, just pay the price.

Sorting out a Comcast modem / router and its WiFi - then replacing it.

Stringing ethernet? Using cable TV cable, or house wiring?

How much internet speed do we really need?

Sending our internet connection into the electric breaker box.

Big gains by simple means.

Bringing our slowest devices up to speed.

Our WiFi radio is way too slow.

Our WiFi home network has become a hinderance.

Why this information from a law firm?

How, you might ask, does a law firm have any bona fides in this subject matter. A staff member whose first encounter with the digital world was Fortran on a Univac, followed by IMSAI CP/M S-100 bus, manufacturing using 3870 Mostek microcontrollers (2 kilo bytes of onboard ROM!) then 6805 & HC11 Motorola, Intel 8051, etc. etc... for years... plus a few US patents involving RF devices along the way in these areas is our credential. When the isolation happened this year, we realized we could and should help our clients stay current with their health & safety isolation and distancing needs while we worked with them on their family, estate and tax law matters. So you see above the kind of --additional -- advice and service we have been dispensing over the past months.