I live in a duplex, and I've always had cable internet, while the previous tenants had satellite internet. The new tenant was having trouble locating their coax cable since it turns out it was cut years ago. When the technician came over, instead of running a new cable from the telephone pole, he disconnected ours and put a splitter in place which now sends a coax cable to both our router and the downstairs unit's router. I'm wondering if this will impact our internet speed, latency, or reliability. Shouldn't the proper solution be to run separate lines for each unit instead? Was the technician just being lazy?
3 Answers
You should be fine! Just run a speed and ping test to see if you're getting close to what you paid for. If there's a drop in performance, definitely call your ISP.
Typically, using a splitter doesn't drastically affect your speed unless it degrades the signal, which is rare. Since cable is a shared medium, everyone in your building shares the connection, so the impact from one additional splitter should be minimal.
There’s already a splitter on the pole, so adding another one just lowers the signal level slightly by 3dB. This is usually not a big deal. But it’s important to check if the technician made sure the signal was strong enough to handle the split without issues.
Yeah, if the original signal was already weak, adding another splitter could create issues. The tech should ensure there's enough signal strength before splitting.