Originally Posted by
cblaisd
I think it's time to surrender and live with the mediocre connection. I'm grateful for your suggestion because it allowed me easily to learn that the outlet in the man-cave is apparently not connected to anything. And it is utterly unclear where the cable comes into the house, and the splitter that sent the picture above doesn't label whether the jacks are inputs or outputs.
Your cable connection comes in underground, right? Do you have a cellar, crawl-space or is your house on a pad? Somewhere around the perimeter, there's coax coming in. Once you find where that's terminated, you have a home for the PoE filter.
I seriously doubt that the man-cave cable is just dangling inside the wall. Did you take the wall plate off and verify that the cable is securely connected to the back side of the connector?
gfunkdave's suggestion re: the tone generator is a good one, but if you have an acquaintance that owns one, you'd have already asked him all of these questions
Another idea: I have an Asus Router. I also have a second Asus router. I understand that if I set the second one up as a repeater, I halve the whole system's bandwidth. But the Asus (RT-AC66U) can be set up as a "media bridge." Would that avoid the repeater-halving-bandwidth issue? And then I just plug the mancave's computer into one of the ports on the router-media bridge?
That would work, assuming a signal too weak to work reliably for your computer is still strong enough to be picked up by a wifi router acting as a bridge
I suppose I could also call the cable company and see if they would offer any help in either setting up a MoCA system or making the man-cave's cable outlet live (while showing me where the cable enters the house for a POE filter)
But I loathe calling the cable company....
If you're having cable issues (video pixelation/artifacts, poor bandwidth, service interruptions, hallucinations) they may send someone out for free.
I'd been experiencing some bandwidth/connectivity issues a few months ago and something anomalous turned up in my ISP's tech support person's automated analysis. They rolled a truck. The service tech spent an hour at the house re-terminating all of the cable connections, then told me
just before he left that there had been a major fiber cut in the Portland ME area that was causing problems for most Maine Comcast customers.