Summary - Installed < 1 week. EITHER: SYNC light flashes rapidly OR: READY light flashes slowly. New modem today, connection up for 3 hours after engineer left, then failed again. Argh!!
ntl250 cable modem w/ 10dB attenuator
4 Mb connection, No other services
Ethernet to WinXP
I am
supposed to have 4 Megabit broadband. An engineer came on Saturday to install. It worked beautifully all day Saturday.
On Sunday, it stopped. Either the SYNC light flashes rapidly and I get "SYNC Timing Synchronization failure" citing either FEC or QAM, or the SYNC light is steady and the READY light flashed slowly, and I get the two "Ranging" errors quoted in the thread subject. It has been doing that ever since. (*)
Like most other people, I spend ages trying to get through to TS, who treat it like a new problem everytime, and I get frustrated. I had an engineer booked earlier this week, and when I called that morning to confirm, was told there was no such booking on the system. But that is all beside the point...
An engineer came today - young guy from Transcable (subcontractors to NTL). (*) "Murphy's Law" - it started working 1 hour before he came.
I am in a first floor flat, above a shop. He couldn't find the green box outside (or was it gray, I forget). The cables from all three flats go straight down into the ground. So he seemed to think I had less protection or signal filtering or stabilisation or something (tech speak - not sure) than I might have if there was a box outside. He was also surprised at the 10dB attenuator attached to my modem - he hadn't seen one that big before!
He (eventually) got a call back from his colleague, and told him about the frequent re-initializing MAC error. He replaced the modem, registered the new MAC, and received a confirmation text about 5 seconds after the connection seemed to stabilise. Great! All working. Signal strengths at -3/+55.5, whereas the previous modem had reported -3/+61. I left the house to go back to work.
I got home - surprised that the connection was still up. Opened a browser. Joy! Internet! About two minutes later - (caused by the traffic?) - the connection dropped. Back to flashy lights and failures in the CM log.
So I phoned NTL tech support AGAIN. Spoke to a couple of guys in Swansea - very pleasant. No resolution, just another engineer booked - but I got an extension number I can at least TRY and speak with the same guy next time I am forced to phone TS and book yet another engineer. (I digress). They checked the MAC address - seemed ok - did some diagnostics from their end and they said that signal strength was fluctuating.
I have been told it's a modem problem, then a MAC problem, now a signal strength problem. Any best guesses? Or has anyone seen this scenario before?
Next door has cable... and my wireless router
(Although not with NTL)
Matthew