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Internet Troubles With Comcast Modem And Belkin Wireless N+ Router All the Wireless Connections work fine, the wired ones are slow&#

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My Belkin wireless N+ router worked fine for about a month. Then all the wired connections started running very slowly and Xbox Live connectivity is lost frequently. I'm using an Arris Telephony Modem issued by Comcast. I don't know what the problem is. Please help. I've been told that the MAC addresses maybe be the problem.

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Perform a speed test. I like to use this site. https://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

While this test does not reflect the actual speed (because it varies because of other variables) it can give you a good idea where to start.

If your speed is slower than what you should be getting, you can try to unplug one device at a time to see which one is causing the problem (although this is not the case mostly). The slow speed can also be contributed by your ISP. Maybe your ISP is upgrading or doing maintenance. Contact your ISP to find out.

If your speed comes close to what you should be getting, you have few things to figure out. Is your wireless connection secure? Maybe someone is piggybacking your Wi-Fi signal. Secure it.

And perhaps this is common as well: you may have faulty wireless router. Try another brand or same router and see if the problem repeats or goes away.

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Internet Troubles With Comcast Modem And Belkin Wireless N+ Router - All the Wireless Connections work fine, the wired ones are slow!Internet Troubles With Comcast Modem And Belkin Wireless N+ Router

Having the same issues...I had no problem having two xbox 360's going on live at the same time with my linksys router...Now if I fire up both both 306's freeze up.  

-reply by Alex

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With the xbox you may need to check your NAT settings and make sure its open as that is usually a reason why you get downtime through a router. Also how do you have your router configured as it may need some changes to work properly and you may need to upgrade the modem from comcast and of course have them check out the connections around your house.

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I would recommend checking if the speed is slow when you connect a computer/game console directly to the modem. If it still is slow then the problem is with the modem or ISP. You may then contact your Internet Service Provider. If the Internet works great with the computer/game console connected to the modem, then it's definitely the router. You can just reset the router and connect it back to the modem. If problem persists, flash or update the firmware of your router. You can download the latest version of its firmware on their website. Saint_Michael is right. Routers are hardware firewall so there are some internet ports that it constantly scans or are closed. You can manually forward the ports required for the XBox (53, 80, 88 and 3074) on your router. The better option is making sure that the NAT is open but will definitely open your network to hackers or enabling UPnP on the router. (These options will generally depend on the functions available for your router.) From what I understand, Comcast uses MAC Address to authenticate a connection. So everytime you connect a new device to the modem (computer, router, game console, etc.) you must restart the modem and the device connected to it.

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The technician who informed you that the MAC addresses may be a problem is perhaps targeting an edge case scenario which is very unlikely to happen because computer component manufacturers build all network interface adapter devices with a unique identifier known as the MAC address. The MAC address is almost always unique but it can be changed. This is rather unlikely but then again, when people have no idea what to tell you, they try to thing of something that is beyond the comprehension of most people and hope that it gets them out of the picture; think of it as a kind of a smoke screen that they use to get away while confusing you with things that make the problem seem more complicated. That practice is pretty common in tech support and they all try to get away with it. What you need to do is be persistent in having the customer support help desk send over a technician to solve the problem and make sure that they do not close the issue ticket till they have finally resolved the problem.When you mentioned that the wired connections are running slowly, do you mean to say that the wireless connections are quick as usual? Perhaps you ought to try powering it down and powering it up again. I know it sounds very cliche but routers are like computers and they run on software and that software could be buggy and run into intermittent problems.You may also encounter slower speeds when your Internet Service Provider (ISP) is overselling its bandwidth. If your Internet Service Provider has access to one megabyte per second of bandwidth, they will probably sell 512 kilobyte per second of bandwidth to two customers. However, both those customers will not be using the Internet round the clock and they will not be using all of their allocated bandwidth so what Internet Service Providers do is get more customers to provide the unused bandwidth to. What this means is that when all of the customers decide to go online and download something or watch streaming video at the same time, the demands on the connection are more than the bandwidth provided therefore the users experience slower Internet access and possibly some loss of packet data on Internet data transfers. This is pretty common with video streaming and video conferencing software in which the application drops packets of video data if the connection is too slow, in order to attempt to provide a smoother playback of video (fewer displays of the loading message and reduced pauses when playing the video). When the number of frames dropped is high, then the problem of low bandwidth becomes more noticeable and you should probably switch to lower quality video, close some of the applications using the Internet connection running on your computer, or subscribe to a higher bandwidth package from your Internet Service Provider.The problem with the XBox 360s freezing when both of them are connected at the same time may be related to the XBox 360s themselves rather than the Internet connection. If I were in your place, I would think I'm lucky to not get the red ring of death because then I would need to toss out the console and get an new one. There is not much that you can do really to fix the problem with the XBox 360s because Microsoft did not provide an administrative interface to upgrade and downgrade software components or reset the box to a factory preinstalled state wherein you could undo all of the updates and installations that you did (or do they?).When ComCast changes their WAN IP address, it is based on the DHCP lease time. If you turn on your router, the router connects to your Internet Service Provider and gets a new IP address. Without an IP address, it cannot route your Internet traffic to the Internet Service Provider and therefore the first thing you do when you notice that you do not have Internet connectivity is to check if you have an IP address on the router and you have an IP address on the computer that you are trying to connect to the Internet from. An IP address is assigned to any device for a fixed period of time, assigned by the system administrator of the device. For your router, the Internet Service Provider determines the duration of the IP address lease and therefore you cannot do much to change it. When the router or any computer sees that the IP address lease has expired, it contacts the DHCP service provider and requests for a new IP address. On obtaining the new IP address, the router or computer then waits for the IP address lease to expire before requesting for a new IP address again. The DHCP service provider for your computer is the router, whereas the DHCP service provider for your router is your Internet Service Provider. When the DHCP lease is renewed, perhaps the version of the firmware running on the router does not handle the lease renewal correctly and that probably causes it to lock up. Try and get a firmware update for your router and see if that helps prevent the lock up.

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