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  #1  
07-21-2010, 03:39 PM
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2019 Update:

This post is still helping countless people get fast internet speeds from Charter. It originally chronicled my headaches of slow or dropped connections, with Charter giving me the run-around. The solution was to simply use OpenDNS (now owned by Cisco). Problem solved! Charter's own DNS servers were simply overbooked or unresponsive at times.

And that still works:
  • Either visit OpenDNS.com, get a free personal account, and follow their step-by-step setup instructions.
  • Or simply enter 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 in your router or computer DNS settings, if you're familiar with DNS.
But that may not be enough anymore

In recent times, modems have changed significantly. Throughout 2016-2017, and surely into coming years (because change like this is never quick), ISPs including Charter will be redoing their internal networks, location by location. Everybody in the ISP industry is moving to, or has already moved to, what is known as DOCSIS 3.0. If you try to keep that old modem, problems will eventually happen.

You need a new modem.
And you want/need this Motorola for under $75: http://amzn.to/2yKD2pl

I know, you don't want to buy anything. Neither did I. But sometimes upgrades are just a necessity. Also realize that not all modems are the same quality. You may save $20 or so with another brand, but you'll be sorry, and will pay for it in another way. You'll just be adding problems by using a cheap Arris**/Netgear/TPLink/etc modem. I'm trying to help you solve your problem, not add more!

Charter will again either be/act ignorant, mislead you, or just flat lie to you. They'll often not inform you of how modems have changed, and/or insist you should buy or rent their overpriced inferior modem without saying why. Just ignore them. Pay them for the service, but realize what their "techs" tell you is mostly just BS.

The OpenDNS fix + the new Motorola modem = a good internet experience.

In some instances, as with the modem, cheap routers can be to blame. Of all the routers out there, you won't go wrong with a D-Link router. But you probably already tested the internet directly into the computer, right?


** ARRIS note: Beware of misinformation. Yes, Arris bought the consumer division of Motorola's networking products in 2012, mostly gaining the SURFboard tech, but the name Motorola was not part of the deal, beyond the selling of old Motorola-manufactured stock under the Motorola name. Arris has always been a mixed-review bottom-feeder brand, and still is. The current Motorola has nothing to do with Arris whatsoever, and never did. I still hear lots of ISP employees, Best Buy geeks, etc, giving out wrong info that Arris=Motorola. The Arris license to temporarily use the Motorola name expired in 2015. Zoom, who you may remember from the dial-up days, as competitor to U.S. Robotics, and who has been making excellent modems for 40 years, now manufactures Motorola modems. **


Original Post

For about three weeks now, I've had nothing but trouble connecting to websites. One minute, everything connected nice and fast. The next minute, it was slow. A couple of minutes later, I had no access whatsoever. The signal was dropping, and/or there were lots of dropped packets.

My Speed Tests

I ran speed tests, and came up with identical results:
  1. Sometimes connections were in the 8 to 15 Mbps range
  2. Sometimes connections were in the 0.5 to 2 Mbps range
  3. Sometimes the tests failed, due to lost connection
What was strange, however, was that my upload speed was always a sustained 1 Mbps -- it was never affected!

I generally prefer the speed tests from Google or speedtest.net, though some still like speakeasy.net/speedtest, although I find it can report lower speeds. (Manually monitoring my FTP speeds from USA to Europe, I see speeds that easily surpass what Speakeasy will report from one USA city to another. So I don't know what's going on there. Speedtest.net looks far more accurate compared against my manual calculations.)

Testing the Hardware / Calling Charter

Because Charter phone techs treat all callers as if they are idiot children, I went ahead and pre-tested everything:
  • I walked outside, and double-checked the exterior cable box. All wiring is fine -- dry, sealed and well connected.
  • I removed the D-Link gigabit switches from the main network. There was no change in connection quality or connection speed.
  • Next, I removed the router. At this point in time, I was directly connection from a laptop Trendnet gigabit card to the modem. Still no change.
  • Then I tried the 100Mbps integrated network card. Again, no change to signal strength or speeds.
  • Finally, I tried an entirely different computer. You guessed it -- no change.
  • Because of the 1 Mbps upload being reliable, the modem is also unlikely to be at any fault. A bad modem would fail at both upload and download.
  • All of the wires are CAT5e or CAT6 cables, fit to length, well shielded quality stuff. So that's not the issue either.
So I called Charter, and ran the lady on the phone through what I had done. Of course, the first thing she asked was, "Do you have a wireless router?" (What an idiot! Do these people even listen to us? They always want to blame something else!)

Only after repeating myself with "the computer is wired directly into the modem" did she start to investigate. She said that there were "no problems" in my area, and that there were "no reports" of problems. (I don't actually believe that last one.) She agreed that the modem was fine, having apparently run a test from her end. The phone tech insisted "everything looks good here" and tried to end the call.

I repeated myself that the signal was unreliable, it was not "fine" in any way, and somebody needs to come out and check the lines. Maybe check the Charter switches in my area. So a tech was scheduled to come out tomorrow.

The Fix

Still unsatisfied, and not willing to be offline for a full day, I kept looking for solutions. I was still bothered by 1 Mbps upload being sustained, while the download was unreliable -- it didn't make sense (yet).

When my connection went away again, I did some quick ping tests in the command prompt (DOS box). Connection loss only lasted maybe 20-30 seconds, so I had to act quick! I was unable to ping sites by name, but I was able to ping servers by IP. Ah-ha! It's a DNS error!

I changed my laptop to use the OpenDNS system, instead of automatically pulling from whatever IP Charter was issuing with their connection. Immediately, I could connect to all sites. My connection was ranging from 5 Mbps to 18 Mbps download, and still with a reliable 1 Mbps upload.

I've since set my computer to automatically pull DNS from the router. I changed the router to use OpenDNS, and no longer pull the Charter DNS info automatically. All systems on the network will now use OpenDNS servers.

I canceled the tech call, too. I'm afraid he'll just mess up something else by fiddling with the wires.

.... and that 1 Mbps upload mystery? I think it's because upload tests are transmitted by IP, while the downloads come across domain names (thereby using DNS servers). I'm not 100% certain on this, but it's a good theory, based off the information available.

OpenDNS Note

OpenDNS used to have the setup information available in the open, but now you have to sign up to read the instructions. Just pick the Basic free option. Go ahead and sign up.

You'll be changing your network connection (on the computer) or the DNS setup (in the router) to the following IP addresses:
  • 208.67.222.222
  • 208.67.220.220
That's all it takes to make Charter work full-speed again.


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  #2  
12-13-2010, 06:18 AM
Tony W Tony W is offline
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I registered just to thank you for this post. I also have Charter cable internet, and it has been flawless for almost 2 years...until the last 4 weeks. It has good speeds and signal strength, but was very unstable and would cut out maybe 4-5 times an hour. Just a blip, enough to lose connection, and come right back on. Very annoying for streaming or downloading, or playing online games.

I've had the Charter tech show up twice in the last two weeks, he couldn't find anything wrong with the wiring (new home) and said it was likely a noise issue outside the house. Their phone support just left me more frustrated than helpful.

So, I decided to search around and found your post here. I reset my computer and my XBox 360 to use the manual DNS option, using the OpenDNS numbers. Everything seems to work great now.

Thanks!
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  #3  
12-13-2010, 06:36 AM
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That's excellent to hear about your success.

This is actually a pretty decent "trick" for anybody on any ISP, should they run into websites loading slow or dropped internet connections, when accessing anything via domain names. The surefire way to check is to do that comparative ping of a domain and an IP, from the command prompt in Windows (or a terminal session in Mac OS). Compare against any number of sites to see if there's a difference:
  • Yahoo.com - 67.195.160.76
  • Google.com - 74.125.65.106
  • BBC.co.uk - 212.58.224.138
ISP DNS servers just don't seem to be as good as dedicated DNS companies (like OpenDNS) or hosting companies (like our own host, EuroVPS).

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  #4  
12-29-2011, 12:22 PM
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Thanks a zillion

For your info about changing Charter's stupid DNS number. I've never had 3 full bars before on iPad, Wow! Before I was lucky to get the tiny bar at the bottom and that was frustrating as hell.

I thank you, profusely!


This question was asked in a private message. Rather than hide our tech advice in private conversations, Site Staff will often answer PMs (from any site) here in the digitalFAQ.com forum, so that others may read and benefit from our expertise. Please continue the conversation here. Either login or join as a Free Member, and we can continue troubleshooting your video, photo or web related issue. Thanks for understanding our tech Q&A policies.

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  #5  
12-29-2011, 01:19 PM
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Hi cfeld, welcome to the site.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Cfeld View Post
For your info about changing Charter's stupid DNS number. I've never had 3 full bars before on iPad, Wow! Before I was lucky to get the tiny bar at the bottom and that was frustrating as hell.
I thank you, profusely!
Thanks so much for sharing your current experience. It means a great deal to me to hear this advice continues to help others.

I wrote this post more than a year ago (17+ months), and it's still an immensely helpful method of speeding up slow internet connections, regardless of ISP. It just happens to work especially well with Charter, because Charter has some of the most hideously slow/outdated DNS servers I've ever come across. (For the web developers out there, Charter is the kind of DNS that makes "several days" the outlier in propagation times, versus just a few hours for most decent DNS servers.)

My most recent snafu
with Charter was related to my static IP address. They just up and changed it one day.

Initial phone calls to the ISP were met with the usual stupid replies, insisting I reboot computers and remove routers. Yeah, like that's going to happen in 2011 (almost 2012). A person without a router these days is the same as a person without internet. That ISPs still insist on the one-service/one-computer support is ridiculous and asinine. Instead of requesting more troubleshooting, a new IP was requested, and I've spent some time changing various firewalls and security settings at remote servers.

Regarding iPads...

I dedicated an entire wireless router to my iPad. At the office, the incoming line goes to a modem, which goes to a master wired router, which feeds into three more routers. The wireless router is on a separate /24 IP (thus easily isolated from the rest of the wired network via 255.255.255.0 masking), and is MAC-locked and WPA secured to two devices: a Blu-ray player used for disc testing, and an iPad. For whatever reason, that also sped up my iPad performance. I don't think consumer routers handle too much traffic all that well, so having just a couple of wireless-only devices on a single router has worked great. Large file transfers can still be made between systems internally, on sub-routers and switches, and the master router and wireless router are unaffected by the data transfer.

This may not apply to a lot of people, but I just wanted to put it out there.

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  #6  
12-29-2011, 01:40 PM
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To add another tip to this post...


Blocking bad sites via OpenDNS:

In addition to simply speeding up your Internet speeds, advanced DNS services give you control over blocking "bad sites". Parents out there can input the OpenDNS into the router, and then password-protect the router. Little Timmy and Suzy then have no way to go around your protections*, unlike nanny software, because the blocks are hardwired in at the earliest part of the incoming signal. Schools use this kind of technology to block any number of time-wasters: Facebook, mySpace, Youtube, porn, games, malware, proxies, etc. By default, OpenDNS already blocks known phishing and malware sites, but you can add custom domain names to be blocked.

(* Unless they both have administrative access to the computer and know how to change DNS on the computer itself; however, most kids won't know about DNS blocking. Not yet, anyway, from my experience. Kids should never have full admin access to shared family computers. Give them a login, and restrict their ability to change networking settings in the control panel.)

This is done by signing up for free OpenDNS service (or paid version) and then logging into the OpenDNS dashboard.

opendns-domainfilters.jpg


What to Block:

While I don't believe in puritanical censorship, there is something to be said for blocking specific porn sites. These sites are time-wasters, and generally project unrealistic portrayals of sex to teens and college students. Kids should be outside being social and making real relationships, not sitting alone in front of a glowing screen. With a few entries, you can block all of the biggest Youtube-like porn sites: youporn.com, spankwire.com, xvideos.com, xhamster.com, tnaflix.com, redtube.com, and others. (Tip: Look at the Alexa Top 500 list, and scan for pornography sites.)

You can also block a lot of sites known for "sharing" malicious software, unauthorized software downloads, torrents, porn downloads, etc. Generally speaking, it's just stuff that your kids might do, which in some way may come back to harm you -- either by subjecting you to letters from lawyers, or by hosing your computer with malware. Sites worth blocking include: thepiratebay.org, rapidshare.com, megaupload.com, and quite a few others. It will take some research on your part. Google keywords "torrent" and "rapidshare" and you'll quickly come up with a list of junk domains.

The thing to remember is that the goal is not blocking everything, but simply to block the easiest targets. Frustration will generally cause a person to get back on-task, as opposed to continuing to look for more outlets. OpenDNS even lets you add custom block pages, should you feel the need to scare anybody and make warnings.

You can also block entire categories via OpenDNS, but I suggest against it, because there may be false positives, meaning legitimate and non-harmful are now unavailable to you. Overly aggressive (and misguided) parents may also opt to block Facebook, mySpace, Youtube and others. But that's really taking it to the extreme. Wacky conservative types have gone so far as to block news sites like CNN and MSNBC, because they want their kids to be indoctrinated by the cult of Fox News. Please block sensibly.

To see what traffic is happening on your network, you can also enable stats in the dashboard. That will let you analyze traffic in/out, and you can identify any new problem domains that may need to be blocked.


Important notes on dynamic vs static IP, and IP tracking:

Cable internet providers generally provide semi-static IP address. If your modem is on 24/7, and you have the same router, your IP address likely does not change often, if ever. You can always check up on your IP address by visiting a site like WhatisMyIP.com.

DSL users, and dial-up users (the dozen of you still left out there), have new IP addresses every few hours, because of how that dated technology works. This is called dynamic IP addressing. OpenDNS has accounted for this, as can be read at this page: Dynamic IP Technical Details. They suggest using their other free service DNS-O-Matic, which tracks your IP changes and ties it automatically to your OpenDNS account. In fact, I don't believe I've ever used DNS-O-Matic before, but my OpenDNS login works there, too!


And that's it for now...

I almost feel like an OpenDNS ad right now, but this service is immensely helpful in a number of ways -- not just speeding up slow internet.

If this post/thread has helped you, let us know. Or if you have questions, feel free to reply at any time.

Take care.



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  #7  
09-01-2012, 04:20 PM
maryloody maryloody is offline
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Hey I read your entry on making charter internet faster, but couldn't figure out how to opendns or basically any of the technical stuff you said.
Can you walk a mac (dummy) user through how to do it?
Thanks,
ML
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  #8  
10-20-2012, 01:24 PM
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You, Sir, are an absolute LEGEND!! this really helped me out a lot, thank yoU!!!
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  #9  
10-24-2012, 03:22 PM
bigk181 bigk181 is offline
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I used to have sporadic connection issues but this fixed the problem. Thank you so much for your help!

As far as web site blocking, I recommend using K9 Web Protection. It's the best web filtering program I've ever used and it's free. It has a lot of options for site and keyword blocking.
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  #10  
10-25-2012, 04:36 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bigk181 View Post
I used to have sporadic connection issues but this fixed the problem. Thank you so much for your help!
It's nice to see so many folks have found this page useful.

Quote:
Originally Posted by bigk181 View Post
As far as web site blocking, I recommend using K9 Web Protection. It's the best web filtering program I've ever used and it's free. It has a lot of options for site and keyword blocking.
Does this work at the browser level?
Or does it happen deeper in the system, like the hosts file, meaning it will block any application trying to access known bad URLs and IPs?

Because I'd almost like to be able to implement this on my parents Windows computers, so that they don't get an eyeful of gonzo porn from the infrequent spam message, or get bombarded by malware from a payload attack. Anti-malware systems are good and fine and all, but you ideally want to prevent it from ever getting onto the system, not merely fending it off (or cleaning it up) once it's already deployed on your computer.

How long have you used this? Several years now, maybe?

Reply when you can.

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  #11  
10-25-2012, 11:33 AM
bigk181 bigk181 is offline
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It's a program that you install on your computer and you can block a variety of categories of websites and specify what websites to block and allow. You can also block keywords and it won't even let you search for those blocked keywords. It will automatically use the filter on any browser that you're using. There's no need to install it for more than one browser. I've been using this for a couple years now and, as far as I can tell, it only works with the browsers. It won't block other applications from accessing certain sites. I've never really tried that though. A couple things you should know if you use it is that sometimes it thinks that a good website is a bad website based on your category blocking settings. You may have to type in some websites in the allow list to prevent it from blocking those sites. Also, if you select force safe search, it will not allow you to search for porn but it will block certain decent videos on YouTube. That's why I unchecked that option so that it won't block decent videos on YouTube. YouTube has their own guidelines to prevent porn from being on their site, so I'm not worried about that.

Here's a list of the categories that you can block:

www1.k9webprotection.com/sites/default/files/images/bcu/custom-list.png
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  #12  
02-19-2013, 12:10 PM
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was having same problems upload speed is constant while download was from .5 to 9Mbits
so I was going through my router settings and noticed UPnP was not enabled. I enabled it and now my download
speeds are never below 11Mbits on speedtest.net
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  #13  
02-19-2013, 12:17 PM
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@troyboy731: Excellent.

I take it your package tops out at 11mbps? My Charter is up to 30mbps where I am, and it generally is well into the 20s range.
Double-check that you're getting the speed/package that you're paying for.

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  #14  
02-19-2013, 12:30 PM
troyboy731 troyboy731 is offline
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Yeah I running off my neighbors he has 10Mbit I think if he has 20 it might show lower speedtest speeds
On mine because I'm on wireless G. Not sure if that will show lower speeds than being directly connected
To the modem via cable.
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  #15  
02-20-2013, 11:30 PM
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At 11mbps, you're connecting at wireless B speed. That's the max. Wireless G would be much higher.
It may be B, not G, because of your distance. B has a longer reach. It's kind of like AM and FM radio; the tradeoff for distance is quality.
So there may be some more router setting to tweak!
And it may or may not work.

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  #16  
02-21-2013, 02:06 PM
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Before I decided to take an offer to upgrade my speed from 15 mbps to 30 mbps with Charter, I was experiencing speeds of anywhere from 15 to high 20's download and 3 mbps upload. I got my new modem, installed it and my upload went to 4 mbps so I know they have me at 30, but I cannot get my download speed above 11 now. Not on my laptop, iPad or desktop. The desktop is direct connected and it isn't any faster than the laptop or iPad which are over a wireless router.

I had the Charter techs on the phone a couple of times and they confirmed I do have the 30 mbps service. One tech had me reboot in safe mode with networking and do a speed test and it was 52 mbps over the directly connected desk top! I still can't get over 11 running under normal conditions. I can't understand why the modem I replaced was getting anywhere from 15 to low 20's and just changing to this new modem, I can't get above 11. Nothing changed except the modem and the fact they kicked me up to 30 mbps service.

They are sending me another "new" modem to see if it is a modem issue. I don't think it is.

Will the informationin this thread I read about DNS change help me out or do I have other issues? The Charter tech was trying to tell me becasue I got 53 in safe mode, it's something programs running in the background that is slowing it down.

I thank you for your input and await your reply.
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  #17  
02-21-2013, 02:19 PM
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@Bob R:

It could be several things. The modem simply being bad is actually not outside the realm of possibility. It happens. Unlikely, since it worked at 52mbps, but possible.

I'd try to swap over the DNS. It can't hurt to try.

Otherwise, you'll need to take a screen cap (or several) of the task manager, to see what is running. However, I'm not readily aware of anything that would cause this. Even a virus/malware is not going to cap you at 11mpbs.

Since 11mpbs is the max wireless B speed, I wonder if the router or modem won't let it go beyond that max spped.Are you wired, or wireless. If wireless, I can see how this would happen.If wired, then it may be something screwy with the way that model of modem works.

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  #18  
02-21-2013, 02:39 PM
Bob R Bob R is offline
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Thanks for your reply. I was running above 11 mbps (15 - low 20's with a 15 service) with the modem I was using before they sent me the replacement for the 30 mbps service, direct wire to the desktop and wireless to the laptop and iPad. Now I can't seem to get more than 11.5 or 6 on any of them.

I did a "netstat -a" command on my laptop and I have MANY connections. I didn't count them all....maybe 30 or more. What the heck could cause that? But that's just my laptop. All computers are loafing.

-- merged --

Well it appears I fixed my problem. Having tried many things that failed, I went into the router settings. When I did, a notice appeared there was an update for my router. I downloaded the update, let it do its thing and when it reconnected, I immediately did a speed test. I was pleasantly surprised when I got 24 mbps on the wireless and 43 mbps on the direct wired...off of a 30 mbps service!

So ends 24 hours of aggravation.

-- merged --

Nope....that lasted 20 minutes. Back to the same anemic speeds and worse.. Lat speed test was 2.4 mbps. I don't know what's going on here. I'll wait for the new modem and see if that makes a difference.
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  #19  
02-22-2013, 06:07 AM
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netstat -a will show all you activity on the computer. I have about 30+ connection myself. (I can confirm mine is legit traffic.)
It sounds like the modem is the problem. Why did you get rid of the old one?

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  #20  
02-22-2013, 07:27 AM
Bob R Bob R is offline
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The old one is owned by me so I still have it. It's relatively new at 1 year old.

With the new package came a free lease modem. I figured I'd take the free lease instead of having to buy my own if mine ever crapped out. Do you think if I connect and try my old modem, it might work? I still have a replacement coming from Charter that hasn't arrived yet.

AND....I forgot to mention that my old modem was casuing speed issues as well. Sometimes going down as low as 2.5 Mbps. Having had to unplug my router to reset it and then doing the update and getting the speeds I got before I lost them again....I'm wondering if it isn't my Cisco E2500 router causing all this.

I just changed my MTU settings to manual and 1365. I got 17 Mbps with my Linksys extender unplugged. I put the MTU back on auto and plugged in my extender and now I'm getting 23 Mbps. This stuff is driving me in circles. I'll see if it all craps out in 20 minutes.

-- merged --

That didn't even last 20 minutes. Back to 11.5 Mbps again in 5 minutes.
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