[ale] Latency on my DSL line

[List]

Speedfactory has been having some bizzare problems in the past few 
days.  I had a brief outage (brief for them... about 15 minutes) and 
called them.  The brain damaged customer service rep told me the usual 
things - power cycle and reboot everything, and so on.  Of course, I had 
already done that.  Then, while he was busy getting help from somebody 
who knows something, the network came back.  He claimed it was the power 
cycling that fixed the problem (not).

The rest of the day the network degraded until around 10PM it was 
essentially unusable.   Using Speedtest.Net (the best speed tester I've 
found so far) I was getting 700ms pings and 240Kbs (yes, K) download 
throughput.   Called them back and got the same moron... er... CS rep, 
who said they in fact were having an "intermittent" problem and had no 
idea if or when it would get fixed.  About an hour and a half later the 
network came back.

I don't know if you can invoke Speedtest.net's server via anything 
except their rather snazzy Javascript web page, but it might be worth 
looking into.

I've seen a lot of this type of problem lately.  It is not necessarily a 
nighttime problem, but starts with an outage of some sort, then degraded 
service for 12-48 hours.  Speedfactory has no idea that there is a 
problem, what the problem may be, or when if ever somebody will fix the 
problem.  I have been told (over the several dozen calls I have had with 
them in the past year or so) that my router was bad, modem fried, or 
house wiring defective.  I finally got annoyed enough to buy a 
replacement router and modem, which I keep configured and on the shelf 
able to switch out at a moment's notice to show them that the problem is 
not my equipment or network.

Speedfactory used to be the best service and offered a competitive 
price.  They have fallen rapidly in reliability and bottomed out in 
customer service over the past year or so.  Pity, as there don't really 
seem to be any viable alternatives.

Tom

Christopher Fowler wrote:
> Lately I've been seeing slowness at night on my DSL line (SpeedFactory).
> I assume that for normal people that use the web 99% of the time this
> would not bee seen.  I use SSH most of the time.  Around 7pm typing on
> remote systems becomes a pain due to latency.  My wife has complained
> that the ABC and Disney sites that play videos are choppy.
> dslspeedtest.com does not show good things either at night.  BellSouth
> has done some testing and see no packet loss.  I'm not sure how they are
> doing that.
>
> My idea is to run a program in linux and in linux at our data center to
> do a test between the two machines.  I will take that output and place
> it in a rrd file and I can graph what is going on.  Any ideas on what
> program to use?  I need text output so I can parse the values via perl.
>
> Chris
>
>
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