[colug-432] talking to your ISP

Thomas W. cranston thomas.w.cranston at gmail.com
Fri Nov 30 00:57:25 EST 2012


On 11/29/2012 10:16 PM, Rick Hornsby 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?
>
>
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I am using Skybeam wireless service. I consistently get 5mb/s. No 
contract. I rarely have any delay. Don't know if they service your area.

Tom


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