[colug-432] talking to your ISP

Fri Nov 30 00:04:58 EST 2012

Rick,

I'm on TW in Columbus. If I do a speedtest to a local site (Datacenter.bz,
in this case), I get about 27mbit/1mbit down/up.  For the sake of this
email, I did a test to a pop in San Jose. I got 87ms ping, and 16mbit/1mbit
down/up.

That said, I've asked about performance, and they said that I'm getting
(subscribed) at 7mbit/512kbit...  So, while I'm not paying for 22/1, as
long as I'm getting at least 7/.5, they are in line with their SLAs.

I've heard that they are offering a 50/5 and 30/5 as 'Wideband' service. No
pricing seen yet on that though.

But more to your point, if you feel like you're not getting what you paid
for, your best bet is to speak to technical support (rather than customer
service). You could escalate to the public utilities commission, because
you're paying a metered rate and not getting it. (PUCO for Ohio, not sure
what it is for you in KC KS/MO).

For cable service, being at the end of the line shouldn't matter. It's
signal strength that matters, and if they say you're provisioned at 10mbit,
and you can't get 10mbit, it would seem that there's a physical limitation
of some kind (bad line, bad modem, ???).

I once had business class through TW, because my job was paying for it...
that service was described as being reserved bandwidth, etc. -- but it uses
the same equipment, same physical lines, but was fixed at 2mbit. And I only
got 2mbit (this was 10 years ago though). In my case, changing to
residential service bumped my speed up almost 4-fold at the time.

Another trick you can try - 4G service...

Good luck on this.  Let us know what the outcome is.

On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 11:16 PM, Rick Hornsby <richardjhornsby at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> I'm sure many of us live somewhere that residential internet service can
> at best be described as a monopoly, so that the ISP you have is the one
> you're stuck with.  For many in Columbus (and for myself here in KC MO
> now), that choice is TimeWarner.  The service is no better out here than in
> Columbus.  I tried to get AT&T DSL out here, but every time it rained, the
> DSL signal went out.  Couldn't get them to fix it.  Gave up.
>
> Despite paying for a 10Mb/s link, I've pretty much never seen that for
> real.  It was awful for a couple of months, then got a little better.  4-5
> is about what I can hope for on the best day.  Over the last few days, my
> connection has gotten progressively worse to the point where barely
> acceptable streaming video is now pretty much impossible.  It seems that
> this might be a combination of factors including speed and jitter.  A
> straight download of 600MB on iTunes now takes about 40 minutes - by my
> calculations around 2Mbp/s.
>
> The streaming issues are with youtube, iTunes, Amazon instant video, and
> Netflix - so blaming any one of them doesn't work.  My bluray player does a
> neat trick - it shows you the current speed while streaming amazon instant
> video.  I watched it the other night bounce around between 3Mbp/s and
> 0.4Mbp/s.  A 20 minute tv show took about 40 frustrating minutes to watch
> because it kept pausing.
>
> So here's my question - how do you talk to your ISP to get them to fix (or
> even acknowledge) the problem?  I can run all the speed tests in the world
> and they're going to be all over the map (right now they're showing around
> 2.2Mbp/s to the nearest test loc in Chicago - which matches up with the
> 600MB download from iTunes).  Of course if I run a speed test to some local
> place across town it might be fast.  Why wouldn't it be?  I've had them
> claim before that if this test came back fine once then I had nothing to
> complain about.  I've also had a TimeWarner guy, in the same conversation,
> say that whatever speed I had was the best I was going to get because I was
> at the end of the line.  But if I would upgrade, it would be faster.  I'm
> already getting about 20-40% of what I'm paying for.  It doesn't seem to me
> to make sense to upgrade, and pay more to continue to get 20%?
>
> Are there any numbers or data I could gather that the ISP would listen to?
> ie http://www.dslreports.com/pingtest/442a7a7934b9/2966826?r=828.  I know
> about netstat, traceroute, and those sorts of tools.  Are there magic words
> to get to talk to a person who knows anything about anything?  Does
> springing for "business class" service really do anything other than give
> the ISP more money?
>
> For work reasons, I'm considering moving about 30 minutes away in the
> spring.  I'm also considering trying to find a place where Google Fiber is
> going to be.  But moving because of crappy internet seems a little extreme.
>  Barring that, how do you deal with your residential ISP?
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> colug-432 mailing list
> colug-432 at colug.net
> http://lists.colug.net/mailman/listinfo/colug-432
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.colug.net/pipermail/colug-432/attachments/20121130/90a791a1/attachment.html 