They tried telling me that too...when in actuality, my neighbor had spliced (and did a fine job of it too!) into my cable box and was leeching. Interestingly enough, it pulls the roadrunner bandwidth first for basic cable when they do this...the tv cable ran fine and never had problems, just the broadband was crap and would lag out and drop...this happened for months, and 3 tech visits, before a tech finally found the splice (like I said, they did a good job on it). So if that's a possibility, check into it, or if you're using a wireless router, it can be leeched that way as well...

We've had techs tell us that, and I find that to make absolutely no sense and hold no water due to the fact that corporations run hundreds of feet of cat5 and never lose any in the process...there have also been times where even from our router, the roomie on his 100ft cable takes all the bandwidth when I'm on a 3ft one.

Gets my vote!

My cable to my modem is about 18 ft long or so. It hasn't given me any problems. *shrugs*

Anything under 200ft doesn't lose much compared to a calbe connection. More than 6 feet won't get you the full 100mbs that you could use on a LAN, thats about it.

As for your cable going in and out. Trace your cable lines back to the box. Make sure it is grounded correctly, and has no kinks in the line. I know this probably sounds silly, but I had this exact thing happen to me. Our connection would drop to insanely poor and then go to really high. Turns out we had a bad splitter on the line breaking it to our cable box/tv.

The difference between a 6' cable and a 15' cable in your environment should not even be an issue... except maybe if you have a really crappy cable modem (even then, that length should not matter... most Verizon DSL & FiOS modems ship with a 25' LAN cable). It could be a bad cable, one way to check is to swap out another LAN cable (most Home Depot & Lowes stores can them pretty cheap).

Now admittedly me being the geek that I am... I do use short cables. Like the one between my DSL router and my PC is only 1' long. No sense in the data traveling around in a bundle behind the desk when the router sits directly on the PC.

That said, wiring and connectors do matter... but usually cables are good. It doesn't hurt to have a second cable to check. If the second cable resolves the issue, then cool you know. If not, back to the cableco.

If need be, give the cableco notice... 3 days for a field tech to resolve the issue, or lose you as a customer. Sometimes ISPs need some "prodding".

Id do as Nok said.. switch cables and see if anything happen.. if that doesnt help id call and talk to tech once more.. hopefully get someone more helpfull and request a new cablemodem to see if it helps, also ask about the boost if its already installed correctly in that area.

If none of this helps.. id change isp.

Well, I found another cable in my box of stuff (it's a rather large box full of... stuff) and tried it, but still had no measurable connection (Speed test timed out at 37 kbps). So, I called the guy that installed my modem, and he came out the same day with a brand new modem. Upon installation, my connection is hovering right around 6970 kbps, just shy of the advertised 7000. Thanks everyone for your input and advice... off to use the faster connection to search for airline tickets to whatever country that tech guy was from... nah, I'm sure with his customer service abilities, he'll tick someone else off soon enough they will take care of him for me!

Thanks again!

that's awesome news. glad to hear all is well ari!

Good to hear it's resolved Arioch.

Nice one matey!