Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: W7LPNRICK on August 29, 2011, 09:10:08 PM
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See Rule #14
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Thats funny I just bought a 51" flat screen 3d and I was looking a roku's.
But instead I got a logitech revue that i'm posting this with.
Basically it does what a roku does except I have a keyboard and I can surf the web with it, and it was only 99.00$
Pretty sweet little toy and I'm lovin my huge tv lol check the revue out :aok
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I had an ISP come into my area in early 2000 and lay brand new fiber line. I have a 100mbit pipeline running into my house that feeds my cable TV, Phone and 15Mbit symmetric connection. Now... the phone and cable are each on their own line mind you.... I could pay an extra $100 a month and have my connection uncapped 100mbit up/down. Anyways, my ping rates are flat and flawless and I have 10 years of insanely awesome internet service.
Unfortunately, the ISP had gone bankrupt and the service was purchased by Surewest. Promptly, problems began.
First problem was all of the great 'offers' they kept calling, stopping by and mailing me about, attempting to get me to sign onto a new contract (so they don't have to honor my current one that was grandfathered over). Finally got them to stop that. Then came their attempt to bill me for my in home network I've setup. They replaced the cable boxes, saw the network and said, "You're not paying us the monthly network fee!" I politely informed them that this is my personal network that I administrate myself, they are not to touch my equipment and there is no network fee in my contract.
This seemed to have angered them, because after that I would lose connection to any game, movie, or any streaming content every 5 minutes. I called and complained for 2 weeks trying to get an answer as to why this was happening. Every time they would say, "It's your network causing the issues, you need to purchase our network package that we'll support and that'll fix the problem." I was livid and began to tear my own network apart looking for bad connections, checking IP assignments and refreshes and all the good stuff tyring to figure this out. No problems. I then ran a tracert and got the IP addresses of the switch the line comes in on, as well as the relay up the street. I would run pings to these servers. My computer to the router, fine. R My computer to switch... Fine. My computer to the relay was fine, except for every 5 minutes, it was not returning a ping. I noticed after this, the IP on my switch would change as well. Finally the problem was found out and I called back tech support and asked why they had a 5 minute refresh on my IP address... at this point they started getting defensive about 'dynamic ip's'. Finally, somehow I got a hole of someone who was apologetic, and turned my refresh back to something reasonable.
Needless to say, it's all because they don't like my contract and thought they could play the "It's a bunch of tubes!" line with me.
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Short story from the sugar beet & onion fields of eastern Oregon. Qwest laid out DSL service to this area. Due to their ineptness, they barely staffed this area to maintain good service. Many times in the past, my brother's, my mom's, & my sister's DSL would crap out. Trace route pointed soley to a Qwest hop more toward this end of the trace route. I :furious :bhead :furious enough to various tech support folks that I finally got a hold of the main guy responsible in Denver.
We got it resolved.... for now.
Waiting for the next hiccup with (now) Century Link.
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...*snip*
Needless to say, it's all because they don't like my contract and thought they could play the "It's a bunch of tubes!" line with me.
:O
...Wow. That's the single worst ISP story I've ever heard. I've heard stuff that caused larger inconvenience for the user than this, but the sheer evil of that tactic is frankly astonishing. Glad you pinned them down on it.
Wiley.
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:O
...Wow. That's the single worst ISP story I've ever heard. I've heard stuff that caused larger inconvenience for the user than this, but the sheer evil of that tactic is frankly astonishing. Glad you pinned them down on it.
Wiley.
But it's REALLY NOT astonishing or rare anymore. Dirty tactics to force you to play by their rules, when they change the rules, is the new norm. :old:
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But it's REALLY NOT astonishing or rare anymore. Dirty tactics to force you to play by their rules, when they change the rules, is the new norm. :old:
It makes me sad... I'm in Canada on Shaw cable and have had fairly decent service. Their front line people can have *cough* varying levels of competency, but on the whole I haven't found them to be bad overall.
Wiley.
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See rule #6
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Short story from the sugar beet & onion fields of eastern Oregon. Qwest laid out DSL service to this area. Due to their ineptness, they barely staffed this area to maintain good service. Many times in the past, my brother's, my mom's, & my sister's DSL would crap out. Trace route pointed soley to a Qwest hop more toward this end of the trace route. I :furious :bhead :furious enough to various tech support folks that I finally got a hold of the main guy responsible in Denver.
We got it resolved.... for now.
Waiting for the next hiccup with (now) Century Link.
I have qwest/Century Link.
I used to have great DL & UL speeds as well as a steady connection. The last 4 months or so everything went south. I called them to find out what the problem was and was told that they had oversold their service. In other words, their equipment couldn't handle all of the traffic that they were routing through it. I asked what they planned on doing about it? They said that they had their engineers working on it but didn't know when they would be able to fix the problem.
I'm about ready to go back to dial up. :mad:
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I have Comcast...and it's pretty terrible. About once a week my internet connection completely dies out for hours overnight, which is the time I'm generally on it. I finally managed to solve it down to it likely being a problem in the wiring or systems outside the apartment...at which point I discovered the person upstairs has been having similar issues with their internet and TV (I don't watch cable) and has had them out over 10 times...it all comes down to Comcast saying the apartment managers have to pay to have the cabling replaced and the apartment managers saying that the service provider needs to fix it. So ho hum.
I've had them for years (since they're the only broadband or TV provider out here that isn't satellite, which the apartment complex won't let us have) and it's always been "Problem's on your end, you fix it." I suppose we're too monopolized suburban for them to care about our service.
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I have qwest/Century Link.
I used to have great DL & UL speeds as well as a steady connection. The last 4 months or so everything went south. I called them to find out what the problem was and was told that they had oversold their service. In other words, their equipment couldn't handle all of the traffic that they were routing through it. I asked what they planned on doing about it? They said that they had their engineers working on it but didn't know when they would be able to fix the problem.
I'm about ready to go back to dial up. :mad:
Here is the catch-22 about this problem.
ISP's all design for a specific load and all of them oversell the service. They have to in order to get enough people per Mb to keep the cost down.
This formula has worked for many years. Then came Youtube, which messed up the scaling, and then Netflix which pushed it all over the edge. People want all these toys, but no one wants to deal with the reality of the overhead involved with all of it.
So now people are screaming at the ISP's to build up more infrastructure, while they have not added any more clients. The clients daily download has increased three fold over what it was two years ago.
This is why ISP's are looking for relief in the form of being able to disable certain services so they can better manage their bandwidth to/from the customer.
Put it another way. Are you willing to pay 50% more for the same service you get today just to get rid of the overload problem? I ask, because someone has to pay for it and Youtube, nor Netflix is not going to do it.
Building up more infrastructure is NOT a one time cost for an ISP. It is a monthly recurring cost.
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Well if certain enteties would release oh......50% of the bandwidth they are holding then this might not be an issue at all.
:noid
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Care to elaborate on that?
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I fear the skuzzinator but here goes! Basically there is a large reserve of bandwidth for GPS and the military that the public does not have access to. A large percentage of this does not get used by the militery but they hold it in reserve. In short our WWW is alot smaller than their WWW.
I'll try and find the link.
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It's ok. I was just wanting to know which "bandwidth" reserve you were talking about. Just FYI, that "reserve" would make no difference at all to the normal end user.
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So is it mainly the last mile junk that is bottle necking the web? I guess its what was said earlier about over subscription being the main problem?
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It is not the last mile, per se. Although for cable users it could be, depending on how the local node is loaded.
It is mostly the gateway routers for the major ISP's, which is the problem. Large ISP's use regional gateways to help reduce the costs. The more bandwidth you buy, the less it costs per Mb/sec. Internally a large ISP will, usually, aggregate as much of the traffic they can into local hubs which then feed into the gateways.
The upside of the 'hub and spoke' design is it reduces the number of people to maintain it and it reduces the costs to the ISP for its bandwidth. The downside is, any group of customers, on any hub, could bring the network to its knees, for everyone, without throttling of some kind.
So when a Youtube or Netflix gets popular, it can reduce a well running network into a mess really quickly. Quite frankly, if I was running any of the large ISP's I would throttle the inbound traffic from Yourtube and Netflix in order to keep the network from being swamped for everyone. It is the only other alternative to raising prices and building out more infrastructure.
All ISP's over-subscribe. They have to. You want a one-to-one ratio? Are you prepared to pay a $1,000.00 a month for your Internet? The ratio has not changed for the ISP. The only thing that has changed is the amount of data per customer the ISP has to carry today.
I am glad I am not in that business anymore.
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It makes me sad... I'm in Canada on Shaw cable and have had fairly decent service. Their front line people can have *cough* varying levels of competency, but on the whole I haven't found them to be bad overall.
Wiley.
Sh-w cable has an American counterpart who had them (Sh-w) playing dirty tactics here in the USA, out of reach of the USA enforcement folks, hacking and shutting down my VOIP phone, disabling my firewall program, etc.. When I caught them & traced their IP, they said I couldn't prove anything, so I sent the the digital packet files after I had saved them on my removable hard drive. They immediately got back in my PC and deleted the packet files from my normal files & deleted my firewall files. I wrote them a note & said I still had the files saved on my removable...they never came back. They do this kinda BS all the time, just most folks can't prove it & don't know what's happening, so they dump their VOIP phone service etc., and go with the one their service provider is pushing. Respectful business behavior right?