[colug-432] talking to your ISP

[Steve VanSlyck]

What is the speedtest site for Dublin/Columbus?

Bill Baker <bill_chris at earthlink.net> wrote:

>I work for TWC business class, and basically what you're going to want
>to do is talk to technical support.  Have them check the SNR and the
>flap count on your connection to make sure they're within an acceptable
>range.  Do a speedtest from their in-house speedtest website, which for
>Kansas City is http://speedtest.peakview.rr.com.  If you're not getting
>good speeds from that site, that proves you have a problem and they
>should send a technician out to you.  If you can't find any problems
>and/or they won't send a tech, insist on talking to tier 3 support.
>
>Good luck,
>
>--Bill
>
>On 11/29/2012 11:16 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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