Topic: Internet pathetically slow

[Cobra951]

This site is normally slow, but now for some reason my whole connection is dog-slow.  It feels like dialup on a bad day.  I get timeouts reaching servers all the time, and I can watch stuff pop up one item at a time.  Big images can take minutes to load.  I reset both the modem and the router.  I rebooted my system.  No use.

Scott, I know you use the other guys, but I thought maybe you heard something about RR having problems?  Could all the damn rain we've had create havoc with the wiring somewhere, maybe?  I'm trying to get on home.rr.com, but that's having a real hard time too.

[Cobra951]

Man.  2 hours on the phone with support so far.  I got left hanging after the 2nd guy, who said he was going to patch me right through.  Asshole.  Now I'm talking with this woman who wants me to go through the whole litany of scripted bullshit again.  And . . . I'm getting passed on to someone else again.  Oh joy.

[scottws]

Yeah, support can suck.  See, the thing is that all that BS is necessary.  There really are people out there that don't realize that it's bad if all the lights are off, or even if they realize that the lights being off is a problem, they think it's a device problem and don't bother checking the power cord.  It truly happens.  So that's why you're always made to feel like an idiot when you call.  Because there are people that dumb.

You'd be surprised.  Sometimes some of the dumb shit they make you do actually works.  I remember I was having trouble with my printer, and I gave up and called support.  I never call support.  I'm an IT major, and computers have been my main hobby since I was 10.  But I just couldn't get this printer working.

Well, they had my do something really basic.  It might have even been just disconnecting the power for 30 seconds or something like that.  But it worked.

Anyway, as far as your problem goes I think your best bet is with RR support.  The only other thing you can do is try to make sure it's not your NIC or your router.  Hook something directly up to the cable modem, something other than your main PC.  See if it's still slow.  If it is, only your ISP can fix it.

But sure, rain can mess things up.  It's not a given, but it can mess up connections if a device is in a wet place or isn't properly shielded or sealed.

[Cobra951]

It's better now.  It's still not up to where it should be, but I've gotten no "connecting to . . ." and timeout BS yet this morning.  In the past, when something went awry with the service, I'd call the Time-Warner support number and get a recording saying they were aware of problems in my area, and that they were being corrected.  This time, the 3 people I talked to over a period of 2 and a half hours assumed it was all my problem.  The 3rd one was as a result of a phone transfer to "the local office" which never happened.  But I did have a ticket number for her, which was supposed to direct her to all the notes from the previous conversation with their support.  That guy had me do a speed test, bypass the router, and do a tracert out to google.com (which timed out for the first 10 attempts, then went through).  But yet she treated me as if I had just called them for the first time, and had me go through a list of shit again.  Even after I explain to her that it's all been done already--read Ron's damn report under his ticket number, even after I tell her that I'm a software engineer and that I have verified beyond a doubt that the problem is at the modem or before the modem, she's treating me like an idiot.  She was very pleasant and efficient while treating me like an idiot, at least.  But in the end, same shit.  No amount of resetting the modem and PC restarts changed anything.  The modem tests OK at their end.  If the pipe works, and the modem works, the problem is with the service itself.  Nothing is broken, its usage is crippled by some problem at their end.

The way that conversation ended was exactly the same as the previous one.  She said she was going through a whole lot of pages of outages, and was trying to see if any affected my area, and she sad she'd tranfer me to another agent that would help her with this, or some bullshit like that.  So she "transfers" me to the same limbo Ron transfered me to earlier.  I sat on a silent line for about 20 minutes.  Well, nearly silent.  I could hear hold-type chatter, but so faintly that I couldn't even understand it.  Something was wrong there, and by this time, I was way too tired to keep up the fight.

I'll see how it goes from here.  If it doesn't clear up, or gets really bad again, it's back to the trenches.  Maybe I should call their business office and tell them I'm going to switch to zoomtown if they keep doing absolutely nothing to fix the unacceptable RR performance.

[Cobra951]

OK, I finally found an answer I can live with

http://help.rr.com/HMSLogic/network_status.aspx

Condition RED since the 25th, which is exactly the right time frame.  Cinci & Mason affected.  OK, I can at least stop torturing myself about possible problems with my wiring and equipment.  Why couldn't the morons tell me this over the telephone?

[scottws]

So are they doing anything to fix it?

[Cobra951]

No change so far.  It seems they have intentionally crippled certain things, like streaming video.  Youtube is entirely unusable, though it comes up and tries.  Images load in chunks.  I'm not getting nearly as many "Connecting to . . ." and "Looking for . . . " blurbs on the Firefox status line as I did soon after the event.  ("Waiting for . . ." blurbs last longer.)  I get almost no server timeouts anymore.  A Speakeasy speed test yesterday came up with:

Download Speed: 3134 kbps (391.8 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 491 kbps (61.4 KB/sec transfer rate)

This seems reasonable, if a bit slow, but in practice, it's fast spurts with long pauses.  The problem seems to impact connections and how long they last, rather than pipe speed.  Does that make sense?

[Cobra951]

Yay!  Is fix!  Modem was dropping 40% of packets.  New modem, zero loss.

After getting nowhere with support, I called my brother who works with Waycross.  That's community cable, and what I didn't know is that they have some sort of regulatory authority which includes problems with cable service which go unresolved.  I had no clue!  Next day--today--Warner cable truck shows up with a competent technician.  Got on the pole, checked stuff out for a half hour, used a machine to test the line, used some sort of "Docsys" online tools to diagnose stuff on the line at my PC.  Yellow triangles with exclamation marks.  Ping test read 40% loss.  He hooked up this gadget to the cable line, no loss.  Veredict: modem.  Change that, and the Docsys thingie screen read all green.

Getting 6800+ kpbs down, 512 up.  All is well again with the internet.  If only everything else were just as solvable.

[Quemaqua]

Congrats!

My story hasn't gone so well.  I tried an online chat with someone at Comcast who told me there was nothing wrong on their end and they'd have to send a tech.  They did that today, and the idiot they gave me was pathetically useless.  He basically pinged yahoo.com, got a 14ms response time, asked if I'd tried my connection directly to the computer instead of hooked to the router, then said there was nothing he could do unless I did that first and saw if there were still problems.  He said they had no way to test speed and if I was connected everything should be fine, and if it wasn't... well, he didn't acknowledge that.  Now they're probably going to put a charge on my bill for sending him out, too.  Fuck that shit.  Ghetto idiot took 5 minutes just to type "ping yahoo.com".  As I told idol, it was like having my connection checked by the Wu Tang Clan.  Comcast can rot in hell.

[Cobra951]

Well hell!  I had no idea you were having similar problems.  This guy had no problems doing his stuff with the router in the loop, though I did tell him that part of my troubleshooting included removing the router temporarily.  He had a gadget with an LCD screen to test the coax cable directly, and found no loss there.  The software tools he invoked on my PC were showing the loss, and he didn't demand that I remove the router.  Your guy wouldn't let you bypass it on the spot?  It's a fairly quick thing to do, though it might involve a reboot.  What a crock.

[scottws]

Some techs are just morons.  At work, we have a contract with IBM where they send techs to repair our PCs all over the U.S. and Canada.  At one, hda was clearly failing.  Typically the tech will run a hdd diagnostic utility of their choice in these situations and evaluate the need for a drive replacement.  So this one guy shows up at this store.  He then proceeds to ask us how to shut down the computer and how to run diagnostics on the hard drives.

We also had a tech that was out at a store to upgrade memory.  She calls and says she put the new memory in and now it won't boot.  And I'm thinking, "Aren't you the hardware tech on site?"  It's crazy sometimes.

And Cobra, I didn't know your brother worked for Waycross Community Television.  I wish I'd have known that.  I bought a few DVDs of St. X games from them.

[Cobra951]

Really?  In all likelihood, those are my brother's doing, top to bottom.  Video setup, direction, and editing.  Depends on how old they are.  I'll ask him to be sure.