How can I tell if someone is stealing my cable/cable internet?

[straightsnake607]

So recently had some new neighbors move below me and since they moved in been having issues with my intenet and sometimes my cable. I have cable internet through my internet which I guess is the same thing. How do I figure out if they are stealing my cable/internet? I work from home and my job depends on me having steady internet connection and I'm pretty sure if they are stealing it that may be causing some of my internet problems.

[rowlfe]

Easy. Look at the router history, specifically the list of clients.The DHCP server issues IP addresses to your network devices. All you have to do is look at the list and see if there is one more IP address used that you have devices on the network. Pay particular attention to devices that are OFFLINE as well as active devices. Account for all of your devices, both active and inactive. If you are using wireless and have NO password, then it is your own fault if someone is leeching off your connection since you failed to implement security. The wireless password is separate from the password you need to configure the router. Many people think that simply changing the login password is enough and then since they did not assign a password to the wireless portion, the connection is wide OPEN for anybody to connect and leech.

That said, I think your problems are not from a leech, but rather from your ISP. Cable broadband and wireless have one thing in common, "the party line effect". This is a slowdown in THROUGHPUT (amount of data moved per unit time). This is different from connection SPEED. Speed is determined by the radio frequencies used and is a constant. Throughput varies with the number of users on the line with you. The more users, the slower everyone goes. Your ISP has a single transmitter that it uses to talk to the users. Which means it can only talk to ONE user at a time, while everyone else waits for the line to clear. When the line clears, everyone tries to talk at once, interfere with each other and for a period of time, NO ONE moves any data, until finally the log jam clears and one user talks forcing everyone else to wait again. If there are 100 users on the cable with you, at best, you get 1% of he ISP transmitter talk time, and you wait 99% of the time! So, THAT is what the party line effect is, talking time goes down and waiting time goes up with the number of users. Another thing, the data pipe from your network to your ISP can only carry a fixed quantity of data (determined by your ISP). Think of it as a one lane bridge carrying railroad trains. Trains can only go one way at a time and alternate. Your router handles the traffic control. Everything is orderly if there is ONE application running in ONE computer. Add a 2nd application or computer, and the data pipe is shared between the two, which brings throughput for each down to half of what it was for one. In a sense, two trains have to merge to cross the bridge, which makes the train twice as long, taking twice as much time to cross the bridge. I think you can see that you could be your own worst enemy by splitting the data flowing through the pipe too many ways. Online gamers complain about this all the time, that their gaming slows down, and they do not realize that they are doing it to themselves with multiple applications and computers all trying to get data through the data pipe to their ISP. The only thing you can do is limit the number of computers and applications running on your network to the bare minimum to achieve the best performance OR get a faster connection to your ISP, OR both. My next door neighbor has cable broadband and complains almost daily that his throughput drops greatly when school lets out and after dinner, which are peak use hours for kids. I have DSL, which is the equivalent of a direct line from a port on my router to a port on the router at my ISP, no sharing, no party line effect. The only thing affecting my throughput is whatever things are on my home network. I have 2 computers (desktop and laptop) and 3 network storage drives (no gaming of any kind) so I never have any problems whatsoever with my throughput.