cable modem and ZA incompatibility?

[TimPoet]

Ok, we get home from work tonight and fire up our systems and our cm internet connect is slooow, about 200 mbps vice 1500+ on both our systems.
Until today we had great speeds, and the tech support guru at my roomies' cable modem service (Cox), whose connection I share thru a second ISP address (we're not on a network, each on separate addies and modems), tells him when he tries to ping via those DOS commands that perhaps Zone Alarm was preventing him from any ping at all getting thru.
I kinda doubt it, he said she sounded unsure of herself the whole time.... She told him at the conclusion of the call that ZA has been causing some problems with cable modem connections because of a DLL file problem.
What say you, O PC sages?
What should be our next few remedies to try? (I'm thinking there's a temporary network slowdown)
TIA

[kittyfire]

I have had so many dsl customers with ZA issues I went out and got the professional version and run it myself. I run cable. I've had no problem with it. I do have people lock themselves out of the internet but that's usually when they have settings too high or have been tinkering with settings. With a firewall, I've not seen it slow things down. It's been black/white, on/off, surfing/not surfing. Get your IP and do a trace route... actually, do a visual route at the visual route site and run the demo. It'll show you if there's packet loss and at what hop. ::hugs:: G'luck!

[Airmack]

Whats ZA?

Try pinging your own pc from some were els and see if your losing packets. Or tracert you internet to see if there are cuts in the hops.

[TimPoet]

Originally posted by Airmack Whats ZA?

from TimPoet ...tells him when he tries to ping via those DOS commands that perhaps Zone Alarm was preventing him from any ping at all getting thru.

[TimPoet]

Thanks for the replies, y'all.
The system was already operating at top speed before the cable sub-contractor guy got here. He said he's on the same LAN as I am and his speed was whacked last night, too and that Cox often keeps the info to themselves, which they certainly did last night when my roomie was "jones'n" for online gaming and calling them repeatedly.
So, apparently all's well and like I suspected it had nothing to do with ZA.
Also found out they jacked our monthly fee $5. But also for another $10, which he and I can split, we can get double the speed- 3 Megs down and 256 up! Woo hoo!

[AlwaysUp]

My cable modem gets 800+ up AND down. Is that typical?

[Airmack]

depends what your isp gives you.

you just are prob caped at 800k

[TimPoet]

Originally posted by AlwaysUp My cable modem gets 800+ up AND down. Is that typical?

800 up is awesome!