Hi folks, about 2 weeks ago I upgraded to 100/100 and the tech said my Actiontec MI424WR Rev. I could not handle that speed via Coax after it failed to "light up" after the switch. Said it caps out at 50/50 on Coax. Found this strange since specs say 175Mbps over Coax. Said he had to switch me over to Ethernet and install a jack. That was fine with me since I had desired the freedom of using any router for a while now.
But here's where it gets bizarre: He installs the jack, all is perfectly well for a full week 100/110+ all around. Then very suddenly one day my WAN port goes dark for 5 hours. No amount of rebooting or power cycling helps. I called and they said there was an outage "supposedly" and I didn't think anything of it because it just so happened that a car crashed into a utility pole and broke it up the street from me the night before and they had to replace the pole. 5 hours later I call again and they say no outages and they can ping my Arris ONT and don't show any problems. Tech then spends an hour troubleshooting including even recycling power to the ONT and "rebuilding my router" (whatever that means), before finally listening to my suggestion of just plugging the WAN cable directly into another PC. That lights up fine! Back to router, WAN port is dead. They told me they'd send someone to exchange the router in a few days.
So I run out to BestBuy that night and buy a brand new Asus router and sure enough it works fine! So another tech comes 2 days later to exchange the Actiontec router and leaves. Doesn't even come in to check anything. Wanting to avoid having to pay for a router when I have new free one in front of me, I plug the NEW Actiontec (same model and revision) in. DEAD WAN PORT! Back to Asus, its fine, back to Actiontec, dead WAN port. At which point all sort of alarms are going off in my head. I do a little research and change the port settings on the router to forced 100MBps Full Duplex instead of Auto. Boom WAN port lights up. Speed though is a bit off.. I now maxed out at 95/95 instead of the 100/110+ like I often was getting. So on a whim I switch the port back to Gigabit. This time gigabit lights up and my original speeds return. So I tried setting it to Auto again and sure enough its now "fixed" and router reports Gigabit, speeds fine. What on Earth, right?! Good deal, I think, I can now return the Asus. Except not so fast! I test again a few hours later and consistently get 100/15 or 20 speeds! I do a hard reset of the router, and boom, back to 100/100+. Except the next day I wake up and do a speed test. BACK to 100/20. It STAYS on 100/20 if I dial the port settings back to 100 Full Dupex instead of Gigabit. So I plug the Asus back in, and it immediately works at 100/110+ "gigabit" level. What?! Sadly my new Asus doesn't have any sort of port speed indicator lights or even anything in its config pages to indicate port speed, so I won't be able to tell if it ever falls back.
Anyway, I'm now questioning the quality of the Ethernet install job that the tech did. He ran a very thin looking Cat 5e from the ONT to the new port in the wall, a run of about 10 feet, and stapled the cable to the outside of my house so hard that the cable is extremely compressed and flattened. So maybe there's one possible problem? Another problem could be the hand wiring he did at the new port inside my house, or maybe he didn't even plug the cable in firmly inside the ONT?
I am tempted to run my own temporary cable from the Arris ONT to my router to rule out any installation issues once I figure out how to open it. However, I am not getting any reported CRC errors on the Actiontec port settings page, and I don't seem to have any packet loss according to tools on this site, ping tests also don't lose packets. (I am however getting mysterious occasional drop outs for a few seconds on my VoIP line, but I don't know if this is just wireless interference between the wireless phone and new Asus.) I am even debating buying special Ethernet line testing hardware. Has anyone else ever seen or heard of anything like this?! As a techie troubleshooter by profession, this is driving me nuts! If its a bad run, I'm wondering if I should just re-install the whole cable myself from ONT to jack rather than trying to explain these weird issues to Frontier. Thanks for any suggestions!
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