<p>A little over a week ago, Time Warner Cable had an area-wide internet outage. That was fixed, but every morning since then, our internet and phone have gone out at 5 am and have come on at 8 am. They first disgnosed it as the fault of our “old” wireless router. We replaced it and the problem persists. Yesterday they came out and installed a new modem. The problem persists. They said that if the modem didn’t fix the problem, they would install a new line from the cable box to our house.</p>
<p>I have no confidence that they know what the problem is and would prefer to have a definitive answer before they dig up my landscaping.</p>
<p>Anybody solve this problem before or have any ideas?</p>
<p>All I can tell you is that I have a family member who actually works for that parent company and also has their internet service (no choice, only provider in the area) and CONTINUALLY has problems, complaints, outages, poor service, etc. </p>
<p>If you beat them, you yourself might become rich!</p>
<p>I had a similar problem with our Verizon service many years ago. I did some network troubleshooting and determined that they probably had a bad name server on their network. This problem was around for a month and there were numerous complaints about odd performance on the town message boards.</p>
<p>Thanks for mentioning the message board. We have a neighborhood association message board. I think we’ll post on that before letting them start to dig.</p>
<p>We had a strange problem one winter where, during the day, we would lose half a dozen channels, and at night, the channels would come back.</p>
<p>After 5 service calls, running new cable in the house, adding amplifiers, etc, we finally got a grizzled veteran technician who solved the problem. It seems the rubber boot around the cable connection at the pole had deteriorated and was letting water into the cable. During the day the cable would heat up enough to melt ice in the cable, which would degrade the signal. At night the water would freeze again and everything would work fine. Replacing the cable and the boot solved the problem.</p>
<p>Going out at 5 AM and coming back at 8 AM? Consistently? My guess: one of your neighbors is poaching your connection and thinks you won’t notice.</p>
<p>Going out at regular times implies a human cause rather than natural causes–at least to me. Does something happen in your house–like an alarm system check? timer for the coffee maker?–at 5 AM? That would be another possibility.</p>
<p>Other human possibilities: scheduled maintenance at the local office (but I would have thought they’d figure that out). </p>
<p>Many years ago I had weird phone problems at regular times. It took three months for the phone company and me to figure out that someone was tapping into my phone line (by physically attaching something to the line temporarily) to make a long distance call home to Italy.</p>
<p>Nothing happens at our house at 5 am. The timing of the outages is essentially the same as the larger outage that happened about 10 days back. Once it came back for everyone, the problem persisted for us.</p>