cperrymsu
Leaving things be for the time being, haven’t noticed any dropouts or performance issues. I’m sure one day they will swap the 26 value tap for a 17 (and maybe a 14, but that could be pushing things), that would make a 9db difference. The signal loss passing through the tap goes up by 1db or so (0.5db to 1.5db), so not bad in most cases. A proper maintenance tech will know how to make sure each tap and amp has sufficient input of signal. For now though, the modems are still holding on and not flapping or experience major T3/T4’s, so nothing is being flagged in the system automatically as a network performance issue or outage.
A contractor (premise tech) came out a week after the upgrades (Comcast service calls sometimes take days to happen as that is all that is available on Comcast’s calandar) and fixed my neighbors service, but either didn’t report the issue to maintenance, or maintenance came out and said everything was fine (kind of doubt). He was up at the tap for like 15-20 minutes though. But yeah, my neighbor had to call and get the appointment. Probably had borderline signal before or too many splitters/bad connectors or something. @cypherstream pointed this out on my initial post when I posted my signal levels, sure things are still working for me, but those who had borderline signal before the upgrades may be in trouble now afterwards.
Upstream was a little hotter peaking at 55.8 on the QAM and 52 on the OFDMA, but within a day or two, it settled down and all QAM upstreams got stable at 54.5 TX, and OFDMA dropped to 48. My XG X1 Cable Box is making due with 57-58 TX (as it is on a -7.5db splitter port vs 4db for the gateway), but it can use the gateway via MoCA instead of the internal cable modem if it wants to. Not sure if the internal modem is still used or not when a MoCA connection to the gateway is present, it is an XG1v4. Prior to upgrades, at the gateway and with the 4db splitter, I had 42.8 upstream power (39 MHz upstream QAM channel) on the low end and 46.8 on the high end for the 22 MHz channel. Taking the splitter off would have dropped things by 4db. Be at 41-42 TX, and the 39 MHz channel would have likely dropped to 38 TX. (transmit power).
Before the upgrades I had about +3.9-5.7 downstream power, but that was with the 4db splitter, so had I taken that off, I would have been at +7.9 to +9.7. Multiple pieces of equipment, so I need the splitter and am still using it. Either way, signals were perfect and would cause no issues. Even without the splitter, the modem may have been fine anyway.
I went ahead and grabbed the current levels, almost 14 days of uptime.
In the future, I imagine there will be a second OFDM added at some point. QAM TV is still running in the same bands as before, I saw in the diagnostics that the box was tuned to 143 MHz. QAM TV is going to have to move up as FDX goes in the 108-684 MHz band. (even though to start, Comcast may only use 108-392 or something like that instead of running the full FDX spectrum config).
But from what I heard, FDX won’t be enabled until there are enough nodes upgraded in my city to justify it. Once it gets more popular, then Comcast will offer the FDX speed tiers. This could be wrong though, and maybe FDX will become available in a few months. There may also just be a target of a minimum amount of nodes upgraded that they need to hit before they offer it.
