Our cable Internet has been a bit flaky over the past while — dropouts, slowdowns, the usual sort of problem — and this time I think it's my fault.
See, we don't have a TV, so the cable modem has been connected straight to the jack in the wall. Except that when the cable company made us upgrade the cable box we weren't using, I decided to plug that into a projector briefly to play with it. And doing so involved putting in a splitter to run both the modem and the cable box — and I just was reminded that I'd never taken the splitter back out of the path.
Running the cable signal through a passive splitter like that incurs about 3.5dB of signal loss. That doesn't sound like a lot, but (if I'm doing the math right) that's cutting about â…“ off the top of your signal, which is certainly enough to cause problems.
Anyway, I've taken the splitter out; we'll see if it makes a difference in the short or long term.
