Here's what is indicating to me that the problem roots from somewhere past the modem (though the modem itself is at least partially at fault.)
- The router is fully responsive, and even indicates that the link is up.
- When the connection is down, I called cox tech support and they said they were unable to communicate with the modem. If the fault lied between the modem and the router, then why can't the CMTS talk to the cable modem during this time? Surely if that end was good, then it would be able to communicate with it, yet it can't.
- Power cycling the cable modem solves the problem when it occurs (until whatever is triggering it occurs again.) Power cycling the router isn't required and is never necessary in order to restore full WAN access.
- Yes, I know that the signal levels are perfect right now, in fact I don't think it's even possible for them to improve at all. However that doesn't preclude something coming from the CMTS side at what appear to be evening times (close to 9:00 PM MST and often times numerous other times throughout the evening, up to three separate times) causing the cable modem to stop responding to ALL network traffic. Again, it stops responding to CMTS traffic as well as ethernet traffic from my end. And again, this has happened with three different modems, two of which were even different brands.