Switch from Shaw cable boxes to Xfinity was terrible - until....

[dbcoward]

After receiving the messages that my Shaw cable device were no longer going to be supported I contacted Rogers/Shaw and got the new devices sent out to me and installed them. That part of the process was so easy and well managed I was really impressed and looking forward to the new service, so it was very disappointing when the actual TV service turned out so bad.

Audio would drop out, video and audio would freeze, long load times and black screens switching between channels, loss of image quality - it was terrible and I couldn't watch more that a couple of minutes on any of my TVs without encountering one or more of these issues. I tested my Wifi signal strength (never worse than -70 dBm), rebooted all my access points, etc. Nothing worked and we struggled on for weeks, eventually starting to prepare to move to a different provider - it was just so bad.

Then I had an idea - I had been with Shaw for so long and through all the changes to the modem, cable boxes, etc. I never changed the actual physical layout of the network in my house. The modem was still in my utility room in the basement (where every modem has been for the last 20 years) attached to a switch handling all my Cat5 ethernet cabling, with access points on each floor (in repeater/bridge mode). My idea was, now that I don't need to use the coax cabling to connect my set-top boxes any more, why not just move the modem to the main floor (using the coax line that used to be for my Shaw set-top box)?

Boom - instantly everything worked flawlessly. No audio/video issues, the interface was instantly responsive, it all just WORKED. I then started shutting off my access points and testing signal strength just with the modem. The whole house was now getting better reception and faster network connections then before! Unreal!

So, for anyone else having severe performance issues with the new Xfinity setup - consider moving your modem to a central location - it completely fixed my issues!

[rstra]

@dbcoward  Thanks for the info. When I switched, my living room TV was doing a lot of what you described. This TV was the furthest from the modem and I had the box behind the TV (which didn’t help the signal), so I ended up adding a mesh extender.  My FireTV stick and the TV’s built in apps also work much better now.