Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Not Having Fun

My cable modem isn't providing this "high speed internet" they repeatedly talk about. For a while, my dad was placating me with talk of how bandwidth gets spread out when everyone nearby is online, but we recognized that excuse was wearing thin when I was having trouble reading my blogs at 9 AM on a Wednesday. Something needs to change, soon.

At least Gmail and posting work well enough for now.

7 comments:

Dark Jaguar said...

"It gets spread out" is one way of putting it, though it leaves out important details. Namely, it depends on your neighborhood's hardware. For example, I live in a neighborhood that was rather small just 5 years ago but has expanded by large amounts. Numbers of households are getting Cox Cable around here, and as a result a few months ago it hit a wall where I was experiencing a lot of lag. I'm pretty good at determining where it's coming from and I identified that it wasn't from my own house (the first assumption I always make) and it wasn't limited to any specific domain online (through use of traceroute and such), so it had to be something else. Anyway, end of the story is that after a lengthy number of visits to confirm what I had already diagnosed for them (though I can understand they can't just trust any random customer), they finally went through the work of upgrading hardware around the neighborhood, which took about two weeks. It's been pretty fast ever since then.

You may be having the same problem.

On a related note, if your broadband provider is some no-name company that services roughly a 50 mile radius and no further, you may quite simply be screwed unless you have other options. In those cases it's just the result of them buying the cheapest hardware they can and purchasing bandwidth from a bigger company, and when it extends past a certain threshold, they usually just never bother upgrading anything. The worst cases will disconnect all, let's say 50, of their users every day at some predetermined time to "reset" things or perform other maintenance.

Don said...

My experience with major slowdowns has left me with a very sour taste in my mouth. For a year or so back around 07/08 service would regularly drop to a trickle, and repeated calls to the ISP to ask what in the hell was going on yielded the same response every single time: "We're upgrading the network."

Right. Spin your failure into a benefit. Assholes.

Bronze Dog said...

I think I've found the problem, though I'll have to do some testing to be sure: I've got the cable modem and TV in the same wall jack with a splitter: I can't watch TV and have high speed at the same time.

Bronze Dog said...

Nope. Still crap. I'm in a city that's supposed to have good cable net. I think I've wracked my brain about every little detail, and I can only conclude the problem exists outside my apartment.

Suddenlink is getting a nasty call once my cell phone recharges.

Bronze Dog said...

And I've just now finished a customer service call. He got me to swap the TV and cable modem's slots on the splitter, and all the sudden, I'm back up to normal. I'll keep you updated if that changes.

Unknown said...

Don't assume that just because it's '9AM on a Wednesday' that it isn't a local load issue.

It isn't strange for people who torrent heavily to leave their software running 24/7 with a large list of things that they're downloading and then seeding.

Bronze Dog said...

It's moot, now. It was a bad physical connection at the splitter. I've had a good connection for nearly a week now, without so much as a blip of a slowdown.

Played a game of Civ Revolution last night with my brother. He won economic victory, but I think I did pretty well for my first game.