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I’ve been up to my eyeballs in home projects this summer: replaced two toilets, installed track lighting in the kitchen, planted three trees, replaced the heating element in the dish washer, replaced the WiFi card in our Mac mini [stay tuned] and made our internet cable connection more efficient. Huh?

Many moons ago, I listened to Mac Geek Gab episode #207 in which Dave and John discussed simple ways to make your cable, internet connection more efficient, ergo increasing your cable modem signal strength. What does that mean, exactly? The gents go into all the details in the podcast, but in short they said “Your life will not be [as] happy” if you’re not within the decibel ranges they gave on the show. In short, you may decrease dropped packets and connection timeouts and speed up initial connections and DNS look-ups with two, little cable add-ons; an F Coupler and a terminating resistor.

Total Cost: $2.49

If you type http://192.168.100.1/ into your favorite web browser, it should bring up the DOCSIS cable diagnostics for your network. The two items that you should be concerned about are the Received Signal Strength and the Power Level. In general, the Signal Strength should be less than +10 dBmV and greater than -10 dBmV, whereas the Power Level should be less than or equal to 50 dBmV.

Wanting to decrease the Power Level resistance, I switched the internet cable from the -7 dBmV side of the splitter to the -3.5 side (photo left). I then put a terminating resistor on the unused -7 dBmV side of the main splitter.

Further down the line (stapled to the outside of the house), the internet cable is split again to two other rooms inside the house. We don’t need cable in one of the rooms, so I replaced the cable splitter with an F Coupler (connects two “male,” cable ends, photo right).

As a result, I shaved off 7 dBmV from the Power Level and increased the Received Signal Strength from -9 to +5.4 dBmV.

Bottom line…I have reduced the number of internet connection timeouts to zero! Woohoo!