Comcast router and Steam downloads

[GothiKCowboy]

A few months back my roommate opted into the brand new "Xfinity" modem/router, and the thing has been nothing but trouble. It's his account, I would have stopped him if I could. The first thing I noticed was that I now have to enter my Wi-Fi password everytime I boot my machine. That's minor compared to the frustration it's caused me with my steam account.

Whenever I download a new game it crashes the router. Or whenever a game I already own updates it crashes the router. In general large downloads through my steam account break the crappy ISP provided router.

The only fix I've found so far is to throttle the bandwidth through my steam client. Even then that only lets it work for a bit longer before,

Duh, duh, duhhhh,

The router craps out again.

In fact it's broken right now.
(reboots and reconnects to router)

Anyone else run into this?

Besides dousing the router in gasoline and lighting it on fire of course.

[Cathulhu]

http://forums.comcast.com/t5/Home-Networking-Router-WiFi/Can-t-connect-to-Steam-Gaming-Network/td-p/2029339

[GothiKCowboy]

No dice, already had those settings in place. I did however find out that the router had my PC listed under two different MAC addresses. I deleted the false address and things are working better. Still getting dropped a lot though.

I think long term solution is to install my own router and completely lobotomize the xfinity router/modem and turn it into a simple modem.

[Hi-Torque]

Originally posted by rayceeya:

No dice, already had those settings in place. I did however find out that the router had my PC listed under two different MAC addresses. I deleted the false address and things are working better. Still getting dropped a lot though.

I think long term solution is to install my own router and completely lobotomize the xfinity router/modem and turn it into a simple modem.

This is the ticket in my experience with Comcast and Charter.

[GothiKCowboy]

Oh my internet god!

I finally sat down to fix the thing and the solution was so much simpler than I expected.

Short answer, I should have installed it myself. My roommate came so close to getting it right.

So we have both the xfinity gateway and an HD cable box. I started tracing cables and discovered that for some reason the cable box ws connected to the gateway with a crossover cable. Both boxes were connected to the coax cable through a splitter and as far as I know there's no reason for a seperate ethernet cable running between the two.

A little googling and I find out the ethernet port on the cable box doesn't really do anything. Aside from messing up your gateway apparently.

As a test I reinstalled Portal 2 and my connection didn't cut out once.