Cable modem resetting while playing at Full TIlt

[I_Like_Beer]

I hope this isn't too long, but I put a tl;dr at the bottom.


For the past 2 months or so, my cable internet service has been acting really weird. I just thought it was my cable service that was causing this. But after reading some posts here about people experiencing lag at Full Tilt, I thought I'd better share the story here and see if anyone else is experiencing the same thing while playing at FT.

I get my cable modem service through Charter in the upper midwest. We have had this service since August of 1999 at two addresses. Up until June of this month, it was extremely rare for our internet to go down. I would say it has gone down a total of five times in these 8 years.

In April, I started playing at Full Tilt full time. I have a Dell system which was purchased in October of last year: Intel E6400, 2 GB of RAM, 7900GS 256MB vid card, Motorolla Surfboard cable modem. I open up 16 tables at the limit I play. Pokertracker is running, auto-importing every 3 minutes. PAHUD is up. I play at 4 - 5 tables at a time.

From April to May, everything ran great. I cannot remember any disconnects or drops of my cable modem. The first weekend of June I went on a short vacation. When I came back from this 4 day trip is when I started seeing problems.

As I would be playing, the tables would freeze up. Sometimes it would unfreeze after about 10 seconds, and I never timed out. But aboout half of the time, the lights on my cable modem would go out, and the thing would reset. The reset process would take about 2 minutes, and then my service would be back up. While the modem was resetting, Full Tilt would obviously pop up the window that says "trying to connect" (or whatever, I don't remember the exact phrase). Full Tilt would reconnect, and I would be "sitting out" at all of my tables. Obviously this is very annoying and has lost me quite a few dollars.

I only play poker about 40 hours a month (an hour or two a day), and playing poker is pretty much the only thing I do on the computer, so I've never had this happen to me while doing something other than playing poker. I would say that this would happen every other session. Sometimes it would happen a couple times in a session, usually withing 10 minutes of the previous reset.

Eventually I called Charter and had them look into this, since I thought that it was a problem on their end. They sent someone out a few weeks back to look at the issue of the cable modem resetting. He checked for everything he could, and everything looked fine. Signal strenth looked good and everything. He even replaced my cable modem whith a brand new modem (another Motorolla Surfboard modem).

I still get these resets. It happens as frequently as before. Up until today, I thought that it was my crappy cable service, but now I am starting to think it could be Full Tilt.

Could lag caused by Full Tilt make my cable modem reset? If Full Tilt lags for longer than say 30 seconds, would it cause a reset?

A couple strange thing I should note:

1) I very rarly play tournaments, but a month or so ago, I had cash games going on Full Tilt and a Tournie going on at Stars. Full Tilt froze up on me, just like it had before, but Stars did not. Full Tilt was frozen for about 20-30 seconds and then came back. Modem did not reset.

2) Around the time that this started to happen (beginning of June), is when Full Tilt added in the time bank at the cash games. Is it possible that Full Tilt knew they were having connection issues, and added in this feature because of all thier lag? Very very suspicious.

We all know that Full Tilt has been having some major problems with lag and their site going down.

Anyone have any opinions?


tl;dr

My cable modem keeps dropping on me, and I think it might be caused by Full Tilt