%#!&$! internet problem

Rushie

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Rushie
[rant on] At this point there's nothing to do but sell the house and move back to civilization. Godforsaken traffic filled cities. Is that what I have to do to get reliable internet?

Round ten with these people. Every few weeks we get this intermittent disconnect all day long for days and weeks at a time until they do god knows what to fix it and two or three weeks of great internet then boom all over again. I've had it.

Looks like AT&T might have just brought 50mbs to our area, the only alternative to our current provider but I am LOATHE to try AT&T for some reason I think that might be jumping from the frying pan to the fire.[/rant off]
 
LMAO, welcome to the last mile problem. When I lived in the middle of nowhere TN, for work I needed a fast connection. It was $300 a month, for worse service than I was getting with Comcast at $40 bucks back in the Maryland suburbs.

AT&T likely still has crappy service, but I would also give them a try.
Do you stream movies? If not, consider jumping to a cellular WiFi solution.

Good luck,

Tim
 
As much as I enjoy playing around on the internet and streaming movies on my Roku, I'd gladly suffer without it if I could find a way to rid myself of city "civilization" and all that goes with it.
 
If it’s FTTH... get AT&T. You won’t regret it. That said. Systems go down sometimes. And no matter who you choose. None will give you 100% uninterrupted service.
 
We're on Comcast (Comcrap) cable service. The internet connection is fairly solid, and I don't live in a large metropolitan area (thank goodness). Multi-day outages just don't happen here unless an ice storm takes down the cables. That's happened a very few times that we've lived here (22 years and counting). Granted, high speed internet is younger than that, but you get the idea.

Now, if someone offered fiber connection I'd drop Comcast's cable in a heartbeat.
 
Dare I hope they fixed it??? All day they've been here, troubleshooting, pinging was losing 40% packets THANK GOD it finally happened WHILE THEY WERE HERE! So many times they come and it doesn't happen when they're here, they leave, and it starts up again.

So they went all back down the lines and found a loose connection that was wobbling around, replaced that and dare I hope???? ZERO packets lost. I'm doing pinging for several hours here and see what happens.

Edit update: Overnight, zero disconnects, all morning zero packets lost.

Looking back this latest round all started when they switched to HDTV. At that time they installed a doo dad (flux capacitor?) in our box outside and that thing had an insulated wire inside a round metal containment and part of the insulation was eroded and it must have been wobbling around, possibly in concert with the woodpeckers trying to drill into my house, and it apparently was making intermittent contact coinciding with our intermittent loss of signal.

I have to credit the guys for tenaciously looking everywhere, they crawled through the attic, they walked the whole neighborhood line looking for leaks, they checked amps, replaced other doodads, they replaced our modem twice! they spent hours. Finally found the problem. Lesson: keep after them til they fix it.
 
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LMAO, welcome to the last mile problem. When I lived in the middle of nowhere TN, for work I needed a fast connection. It was $300 a month, for worse service than I was getting with Comcast at $40 bucks back in the Maryland suburbs.

AT&T likely still has crappy service, but I would also give them a try.
Do you stream movies? If not, consider jumping to a cellular WiFi solution.

Good luck,

Tim

We were close to doing those things. We aren't as far in the middle of nowhere as we could be, this town has 10,000 residents but in Texas, towns are faaaaar away from each other but we're only 40 mins from a big city. Unlike back east though that drive is full of a lot of nothing. But they've brought a new fiber trunk to the town and when it's up it's great. I ran pings all night last night the result, out of 49,000 pings only 3 dropped packets. That's phenomenal.

That being said we had a break yesterday and then several hours of spotty service. Called it in and found out the fiber trunk had a break and the entire town was on an old backup line. Inferior but workable, I logged 5% packet loss and the HDTV was horrible, but they fixed it.

I'm curious if cities have more and better redundancy. This experience has shown me what a delicate structure is our connectivity to the internet and our increasing reliance on it is rather concerning.

As much as I enjoy playing around on the internet and streaming movies on my Roku, I'd gladly suffer without it if I could find a way to rid myself of city "civilization" and all that goes with it.

It's a conundrum for me. I hate city "civilization" with a passion. But I also work over the net, not just stream entertainment. And increasingly people are requiring internet interaction such as job interviews, signing up for your yearly Heath plan, seeing the results of your blood test and shopping.
 
We were close to doing those things. We aren't as far in the middle of nowhere as we could be, this town has 10,000 residents but in Texas, towns are faaaaar away from each other but we're only 40 mins from a big city. Unlike back east though that drive is full of a lot of nothing. But they've brought a new fiber trunk to the town and when it's up it's great. I ran pings all night last night the result, out of 49,000 pings only 3 dropped packets. That's phenomenal.

That being said we had a break yesterday and then several hours of spotty service. Called it in and found out the fiber trunk had a break and the entire town was on an old backup line. Inferior but workable, I logged 5% packet loss and the HDTV was horrible, but they fixed it.

I'm curious if cities have more and better redundancy. This experience has shown me what a delicate structure is our connectivity to the internet and our increasing reliance on it is rather concerning.



It's a conundrum for me. I hate city "civilization" with a passion. But I also work over the net, not just stream entertainment. And increasingly people are requiring internet interaction such as job interviews, signing up for your yearly Heath plan, seeing the results of your blood test and shopping.
The answer on redundant connections depends on your provider. The TCP/IP protocol was designed by DARPA (well ok DARPA just paid the bills) to be fault tollerant and allow for dynamic rerouting.
I know at the major connections and carrier cross connects they still have redundancy, how much I no longer know (I last ordered optical lines around 2013, where you have to manage the failover upstream)
Maybe @denverpilot has stayed current.

Sent from my SM-J737T using Tapatalk
 
The answer on redundant connections depends on your provider. The TCP/IP protocol was designed by DARPA (well ok DARPA just paid the bills) to be fault tollerant and allow for dynamic rerouting.
I know at the major connections and carrier cross connects they still have redundancy, how much I no longer know (I last ordered optical lines around 2013, where you have to manage the failover upstream)
Maybe @denverpilot has stayed current.

Sent from my SM-J737T using Tapatalk

Where is @denverpilot anyway? Haven't seen him in a while.
 
I'm curious if cities have more and better redundancy. This experience has shown me what a delicate structure is our connectivity to the internet and our increasing reliance on it is rather concerning.



It's a conundrum for me. I hate city "civilization" with a passion. But I also work over the net, not just stream entertainment. And increasingly people are requiring internet interaction such as job interviews, signing up for your yearly Heath plan, seeing the results of your blood test and shopping.

Have had terrible problems with AT&T DSL as of late. Same weekly service calls that didn't fix the problem. Too far out of civilization for cable, and the last several miles are running on ancient copper phone lines with too many splices.

My home redundancy is now cell phone with "unlimited data" and hot spot capability I can switch the computer over to if necessary.

As a bonus, the LTE cell phone hot spot wifi runs faster than the clunky DLS service I'm getting. :confused:
 
Have had terrible problems with AT&T DSL as of late. Same weekly service calls that didn't fix the problem. Too far out of civilization for cable, and the last several miles are running on ancient copper phone lines with too many splices.

My home redundancy is now cell phone with "unlimited data" and hot spot capability I can switch the computer over to if necessary.

As a bonus, the LTE cell phone hot spot wifi runs faster than the clunky DLS service I'm getting. :confused:

I found out that the AT&T coming into my neighborhood also uses old copper lines. I'd love to have a copper land line but not going to pay for it anymore and besides I think it goes digital at some point upstream anyway. Not going to do copper internet.
 
Been there, done that. When I lived in the sticks, we had internet 50% of the time, at best. I got to know the technicians and they got to know me on a first name basis. The biggest issue in solving it was, the problem was always non-existent when the tech was there, until one day, like you, he was there when it quit. They actually had to run a whole new line down my 1 mile street, then problem solved.

I found the worst part though, was dealing with the idiots that answer the help line (that you had to deal with first to get a service call out). They had a "script" that they would force you to follow..."Unplug your modem. Plug it back in. Is the problem still there? I'm advising you that if we find the problem is with your equipment, we will bill you..." blah blah blah. It got to the point I would call them while driving down the road to work..."Did I just unplug my modem? Yep! Does it work now? Nope!"
 
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