Disco inferno!!!

[Skuzzy]

It is not your modem, nor your local Internet connection.  It is in the Comcast/Savvis connection.  Calling Comcast and talking to the first line support guys is not going to come anywhere close to solving the problem.  Thier job is to handle your local connection only and do everything they can to prevent you from talking to someone about networking issues within the Comcast network.

This is not a U.S. problem.  It is a problem with Comcast and the ISP they have chosen for connectivity to the Internet.  Comcast has no incentive to get it fixed because they have no idea to what extent this impacts its customers because they do everything they can to avoid dealing with thier customers problems by having first line support folks pushing the customers aside.

This is the way it is with all large ISP's.  You have to be a bull in a china closet to get any attention.

[Denholm]

...In any event, what I'm not seeing in your plots is the big ugly red bars (on the bottom chart) where everything went completely off the deep end.  Could be that you just got it at a good time...

Frosty, what time were frame were you looking at? I can run another trace to both addresses anywhere between 12:00 (noon) to around 7:00 p.m. If there's a particular time where you think the problem really shows I don't mind taking the time to run another trace.

[frosty]

I started plotting last night between 7 and 11pm central time if I recall.  There was a brief window when everything worked great, but as soon as I noticed it, it began dying again.  I think Schroedinger's cat lives in my computer. 

When I get home I'm going to run another plot from there and see what I get.

Skuzzy, I can see that the Savvis/ATT/Comcast hops do drop more packets than they should, but I've had Comcast for years (and this is my second go-round with an Aces High 2 account, plus other online games) and though they are pretty boneheaded, I've never seen anything THIS bad.  It's not simply unreliable right now...my connection flat out dies every few minutes, for several seconds at a time.  This is beyond their typical incompetence into a glorious new realm of "WTF?".

I'll keep things posted here just for fun. 

[Denholm]

Frosty, I'll run another trace to both addresses this evening at 7:00 P.M. Afterward I'll post the results. I'm expecting them to look worse, though. Considering more people are at home around 7:00 P.M. and will be using the Internet.

[Skuzzy]

Frosty, the reason it has taken a turn for the worst is due to Comcast switching backbone providers.  They went with Level3 for a while, then they moved from Level3 to Savvis.  As more of thier network becomes dependent on Savvis, the more people will be effected.

The Internet, nor any ISP, is not a static thing.

[frosty]

Skuzzy, I understand your frustrations with Savvis, but I *really* think my issues are above and beyond that (though I'm sure they don't help).  Stuff was so bad I couldn't check email or post on this forum without trying 3 or 4 times.  My connectivity was down 50% of the time, just bouncing in and out.  Are others having it THIS bad?  (Edit: If problems this severe are indeed common now, I'll drop them like a bad habit).

New modem...below is the latest plot.  I did a trace right before with my old one and it looked like a Christmas tree.  Believe it or not this is 99% better...no big red bars in the history chart.  This is closer to what I'm used to seeing, however sad that might seem.  "*Dal1.attens.net" is the ugliest now in terms of packet loss (I failed to record my PL%'s sufficiently last night, but believe me that was the least of my issues then).  I'll up a plane and see how stuff goes, and run more traces later.  Fingers crossed...

[SRD]

Speaking of crappy routing.......



I get 22 hops between all that mess

Luckily I don't have disco problems.

[frosty]

Nice, SRD. 

So far so good for me tonight.

[Denholm]

Here's another two traces:


Once again, as before: Dallas to L.A. to Dallas to Nashville to Indianapolis to Chicago.


And as before: Dallas to L.A. to Dallas to Nashville to Indianapolis to Chicago.


I'm glad the new modem is working for you. However, you might still want to complain to try to push the issue to get this resolved. Yes, they might not try. However, if everyone sat on their butts and did nothing, nobody would be aware of any problems.

[Ratpack1]

LOL SRD that's great!