Service Electric Cablevision/Service Electric Cable TV Discussion

Jed1 · 2025-01-18T18:38:30+00:00

Hi, I'm picking up where we left off at DSL Reports. This thread is for anything Service Electric related. I even added the other division so this thread will cover all the Service Electric divisions. SECV is Hazleton, Sunbury, and Birdsboro and SECTV is Allentown, Wilkes Barre, and Phillipsburg NJ. Hopefully everybody from the old site will find their way here.

SeattleMatt73

cypherstream Was this a business account? Because I can tell you they still enforce the consumer upload tiers at 25/50/100/200

cypherstream

SeattleMatt73 No it was a residential home in my neighborhood. In fact I traceroute to me and it went their gateway > cmts (10.71.0.1) > me.

I have an office on ptd.net. SECV bills us for TV and has the modem on there but a discounted rate. Its an Arris CM8200. PTD.NET sends us a separate invoice for voice and data. One ethernet port goes to a Cisco SPA with 2 phone lines off of it. The other ethernet port goes into our routing infrastructure where we VPN tunnel over it as a backup to a metro ethernet line. I asked our rep aobut speeds and they only offer 1 gig down by 40 meg up. I said woah woah woah wait here, the modem I can see is locked onto the OFDMA channel, and the system its on fully supports 2gig by 200 meg- see the plans. He said that SECV kinda tests the plans for a few years before "its blessed" by PTD to be offered for buisnesses.

SECV itself has a buisness page offering up to 2000/200, so I'm wondering whats the point going through ptd vs going direct with SECV? He wasn't even aware and seemed blindsided by it. We are in contract with PTD though so I can't make any changes yet. I was trying to make sure we were getting the best speed for our price since Comcast just became available in that area (it wasn't before). I asked our Comcast rep what market it was in, Keystone or Freedom. Sadly it was Keystone, which means 45 ms idle floor latency to our colocation facility. With SECV its about 10 ms idle floor latency to our colocation facility. SECV peers direct, I've seen our facility on ptd's fiber map.

cypherstream

Still getting odd OFDMA power spikes from 1db to 61 db. It’s random. When it happens ping and packet loss goes up. This was very stable for months until a few days ago.

When it happens it’s quick and it resolves itself in a few minutes.

cypherstream

I lost all internet tonight. Modem had ok signal. Nothing in the logs at all… 100% cleared. Just couldn’t access anything. Rebooted the modem and internet came back. I think the 8200 is on its way out. I might get a 9200 this week.

cypherstream

Before I power cycled the modem to clear the internet outage around 2:30 am, I noticed the upload speed tests were all over the place. It seems ok now, so we’ll see how long this lasts.

Prior to rebooting the modem, I said there were no logs. After rebooting, all the logs returned, and they go back to October 2024. This is really bizarre.

cypherstream

I'm working in Opnsense on a strange issue where my guest and private lans SECV IP addresses flipped. When checking bandwidth graphs, it seemed this happened after I rebooted the modem this past weekend when I lost connectivity.
After messing around with gateways and firewall rules, I got it sorted. For some reason opnsense like to route everything out WAN2, but really I want WAN2 to be the guest network. It changed recently from a 24.x.x.x IP to another 70.44.x.x IP like WAN1, just the last two octets are different. Anyway opnsense seems to always think WAN1 is down but it routes my private network out it anyway.

By screwing around I got a DHCPv6 IP on my private lan. I now have a 2606:9400:ac9f:fe96 ipv6 address on my computer. My iphone also is showing two 2606:9400:ac9f:fe96 /64 ips in addition to the usual link local fe80 one.

https://test-ipv6.com is now giving me a 10/10 for IPv6 readiness. I can ping ipv6.google.com and get a reply back from 2607:f8b0:4006:81c::200e with an average ping time of 22ms.

I don't know if this is me messing around with static routes and route overrides and gateway settings in opnsense... but I can tell you this... I didn't touch ANYTHING with ipv6. My opnsense as far as IPv6 is concerned is all out of the box settings, DHCPv6 and LAN is Track interface WAN (which I had set that up for years even when I ran pfSense).

I also tweaked my limiters to fix buffer bloat issues since I'm using two WANs from the SB8200 modem and two public IP's, one for guests and one for my private lan. I had to duplicate all the rules basically and settled on a limiter of 920 down by 94 up. I tested on both networks and they both get "A" ratings now. That one was pretty tricky. I felt like pfSense limiters worked better despite the older UI and codebase.

MapGuy11

I can confirm! Turned on DHCPv6 on my Ubiquiti UniFi system and got a /64 starting with 2606::

Also fixed routing and updated DNS records out of the new Morgantown Headend:

cypherstream

MapGuy11

I just wish UniFi would show all the clients IPv6 addresses in the UI to see who’s got what, but still nope.

Searched, it’s not just me.
https://community.ui.com/questions/Display-IPv6-Address-Of-Devices-On-Client-Device-Pages/540218e5-8c6f-428f-9fe2-011374586e84

SeattleMatt73

I played around with some trace routes while I was home and PTD definitely cut out a lot of the clutter for sure. Even a trace from PA to my IP in Seattle, was about 7 hops. Seems like they have some major direct peering now.

cypherstream

SeattleMatt73 yeah it’s one reason why I stay. Comcast came in and have some really great lowball introductory rates, but I’d rather have low idle latency with the better peering, plus it’s all local support. You aren’t dealing with reps from the Philippines.

There’s occasional OFDMA issues once in a while but for the most part it’s rock solid. I feel those issues would be resolved if they just would keep firmwares up to date.

cypherstream

ALL of the new Xfinity system they overbuilt into our township and the neighboring communities that had them for years are reporting Xfinity is down and has been down all night and ETA to resolve, sometime later today, perhaps the afternoon.

Its a good day to be a SECV customer! The grass is not always greener on the other side.

cypherstream

Did anyone else see the service go down around 4-4:10 AM 2/11? I suspect a CMTS firmware upgrade/reboot since the modems lost signal in that window.

A lot of people posted about having to reboot equipment on social media, so I checked my logs and sure enough modem signals were gone in that time window, but my modem resolved itself unlike some of the other people online having to reboot routers and unplug pods, etc...

I miss the engr status page. I wish they had a network maintenance page for customers.

This message is on secv's website for all 3 divisions:

If you are experiencing an Internet outage, please power cycle your modem. To do this, unplug your cable modem, router or plume devices(s) from the power, wait 30 seconds, then plug everything back into the power source. This should restore your service. If the issue persists, please reach out to your local office. We apologize for the inconvenience.

zeroskatr512

cypherstream

Can confirm an outage around that time period.
My rental modem recovered own its own apparently.
However it has been struggling occasionally with the upload OFDM channel dropping down to partial service with the upload falling into the 60s and requiring a reboot to correct. So hoping they might be working on that.

cypherstream

zeroskatr512 I would occasionally get some upload fluctuations but it’s been pretty good since I upgraded to Opnsense 25.1.

I actually turned OFF limiters on the upload and I get better performance and very minimal bufferbloat when maxing out upload. With limiters set to 90-92, when running the waveform bufferbloat test, I’d get severe packet loss on other computers during the upload portion of the test, despite the computer doing the testing getting an “A”. Well I still get an “A” and now no more packet loss.

I did set the download limiter to 920 because if left unchecked, I did start to see some triple digit pings when maxing out the download during a speedtest.

I have automated speedtests at 6 minutes past the hour and store 2 weeks of data.

I can get that download as high as 956 Mbps if I take off limiters but at the expense of latency during said tests.

theARK

I did find the new home here. Not sure if anyone here has discord but it be a good backup to this potentially going offline.

cypherstream

I have the discord app for other things. If I knew where to look I could check it out.

Anyone have outages with that terrible wind? Still lots of power outages. We were lucky, no Power or Internet outages here.

cypherstream

It looked like downtown Birdsboro has fiber taps now lashed together to the SECV cable plant. I haven't heard of fiber being active there but maybe it is? Thats some big progress if its available. I know I did see it in Earl Twp as planned (pilot market) and some overbuild into Oley.

SeattleMatt73

cypherstream That's how it was outside Sunbury. They did a lot of the fiber taps very discreetly. In some spots you wouldn't know if you didn't know the difference between taps.

cypherstream

Since we have ipv6 now, I reinstalled smokeping in a proxmox lxc container to get IPv6 support with fping6 probe.

Decent ipv6 performance for DOCSIS to Google and Facebook in the 20ms range.

Pings to the local gateway pretty solid between 8 and 9ms too.

No real issues here, just waiting for fiber one day.

When I upgraded to the latest version of Opnsense 25.1 on 2/11, I fixed my QoS on the upload side. In fact I removed it on the upload side and just have QoS on download. It improved performance a lot actually. I still get an "A" on the waveform bufferbloat test, and this time when it does the upload test I don't have packet loss like I did with upload limiters enabled.

theARK

Wanted to put it out to the group that MapGuy and I setup a DISCORD to talk ISPs, networking, cable, streaming etc. for Eastern PA. Have some feeds setup for outages and also this can provide more real time chat if needed.
Invite link = https://discord.gg/p7PhzcpgDB

« Previous Page Next Page »