Have you tried turning it off and on again?

Our Internet has been very slow since we got home – better than the service on the ship, to be sure, but there were long pauses in downloads and many other random freezes. I’d updated all of our access points and switches over the weekend and it didn’t help.

Today, things got even worse. I logged into the cable modem and discovered that several of the downstream channels were “not locked”, and quite a few of the others were reporting lots of errors, not all of which were correctable. I also found some “MDD message timeout” warnings in the event log. So I rebooted the modem (and the router, just for good measure) and things got a lot better – all my channels were locked.

Four hours later, I’ve got two channels are unlocked again and I’m seeing lots of MDD message timeouts. And dropped packets. A little web searching says that the next step is physically unplugging the modem for a minute and letting it try to heal itself – after that, it’ll be time for a call to Xfinity. sigh