NTL CM signal strengths fluctuating

Hi all,

Since Monday night, my Motorola SB3100 CM has been up and down like
mad. It's always the Send light which flashes, and after speaking to
ntl they say the signal strength getting to the modem is far too low
(-10 instead of +2). However, the strength is always going up and down
i.e. it doesn't seem to corelate(sp?) to being down /just/ when my
parents are watching TV[1] or time of day / weather etc.

This has happened before numerous times over a year ago, and each time
an engineer has been out to increase the signal level in the box down
the road. My question is, why does it keep happening, and why is the
fault so intermittent? I would expect it to be either "working" or
"broken"

It's working at the moment and I'm waiting for an engineer to call me.
I'm not sure how much help they can be when the problem isn't actually
a problem - I work in IT support myself and it's infuriatingly
difficult to diagnose a problem that only occurs randomly!

Thanks for any tips.

Richard
[1]The cable from the street is fed into my room and from there split
to the modem and TV. I used to be able to plug the modem directly into
the wall box, bypassing the splitter, to work around the problem, but
this is not really an acceptable solution!

On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 11:45:24 +0100, Richard Sobey <(E-Mail Removed)>
wrote:

<snip>

The modem is up again now (well, as of Monday evening) - no word from
an engineer though so I've no idea if it's resolved completely. I'll
just have to wait.

Anyway, I've just discovered I can access the modem's built in web
status server without being directly connected to it. I've found
something called "Upstream Channel Id" and is currently set to 3. Does
anyone know what would be the implications of changing this to a
different value if the modem failed again?

Richard