Attention players who are on a cable internet connection!

[Catwho]

If you are like me and have been experiencing random lag, infuriating disconnects, and problems with the Internet that appear to be originating at your local ends and not just because of the usual Level 3 and DDoSing stuff:

YOU MIGHT HAVE A BAD CABLE MODEM



Today I learned about the Intel Puma 6 chipset, which was used on a lot of home cable modems distributed through Time Warner, Spectrum, Cox, Comcast, and other ISPs. There was a known bug in this chipset even when it was released in 2015, but most ISPs just kind of.... pretended it didn't exist? And hoped people wouldn't notice.

Business users probably didn't see any problem, nor did the majority of users who use their internet for basic things like web surfing and checking email. The problems only become more apparent with a super user (read: gamers and streamers) who hammers at the modem near the CPU's max capacity, at which point the CPU would choke and start having major latency issues.

Today my ISP swapped out my old modem with the bad chipset (check this website for a list of all known models that have the bad Intel Puma 6 chipset) with a newer modem on a Broadcom chipset. Note that Intel and the modem manufacturers released a firmware update, but that didn't really solve the problem.

It's only been a few hours, but so far I have not:

- Lost a craft due to lag
- Rubber banded in an instance due to lag
- Gotten a 90002 out of nowhere

This probably won't solve everyone's internet problems. It probably won't even solve all of my problems. But for a problem with so many potential sources, it's nice to know that at least one is a real legit problem with the hardware and I'm not just going crazy!

Here is a technical discussion of the TCP lag spikes this modem experiences.