Awful cable performance

[OZrevhead]

I am a long time user of Bigpond cable (mainly due to no viable competition where I live) and we have been mostly very happy with our internet performance but recently it has gone downhill badly. If I speedtest it I get normal numbers but internet usage is noticeably slower (pages and images take much longer to load) but the biggest impact has been with online gaming. We have multiple online gamers in our house and everyone could game happily before, now our pings are terrible and very erratic. Australian servers jump between 10 and 1000 ms with 20-50% packet loss, forget overseas servers, we could play on them before but now pings can jump up to 2500ms and beyond.

I contacted support this week and described my issues, they said my area is having an outage and will have to wait until the outage is corrected before they can progress with the issue, I asked how can I be having an outage when I am online now? They said yes you are having an outage ... I checked myself and the system status showed no known issues ....

So, what do you all think can cause such issues and how do I fix it?

I am still using an old CG3100D modem, and I have a C6300BD still in the box, but the above mentioned support person told me I should be using the new smart gateway .... are they right?

Is Telstra sabotaging my cable to steer me onto NBN? Has NBN improved since the early days? I have never heard anything good about NBN and am very concerned with being forced off my cable.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[343GuiltySpark · Accepted solution]

You're modem being old could be the issue. NBN own/are working on the cable infrastructure something they could be doing may have affected your ping. If you ping your modem does your ping fluctuate

[OZrevhead]

I ran ping a few times and all results <1ms

Yeah could be, its woeful.

[343GuiltySpark · Accepted solution]

Id probably replace the modem and call cable tech support to get the mac address changed to your new modem

[OZrevhead]

Hi, I cant do this online as I wont have internet if I swap modems right?

Support told me to activate online after I swap modems ...

[ProfessorPhone · Accepted solution]

NBN now own the ex Telstra HFC cable network.
NBN are actively working on the remaming cables in preparation for moving customers from Cable and ADSL across to NBN.
I wouldn't be spending any money on modems if chargeable at this stage.

[343GuiltySpark]

When you swap the modem over and try and good to Google, it should take you to a site like bigpond.register/cable.do when you need to put in your primary bigpond email address and password.

If this fails or you dont know the password id reconmend calling the cable tech support team.

[OZrevhead]

I already have the new modem to try, I just didnt want to jump into swapping (since I cant swap back to the old one).