Bad connection, comcast tech says it's fine. Help me prove him wrong.

[Stallion]

At least a month ago I started to notice that when I played CS my ping would go from 50 to 3000 at the drop of a hat and stay there. It would be after about 5 minutes or less of play. I finally called attbi/comcast and asked them to ping our house. Sure enough, the phone tech said there was a slow connection to our modem on their side so they sent out a tech. He swaped our modem and said if we still had a problem to call it back in and ask the phone rep to ping other customers in our neighborhood to see if it was just us or maybe a bad line.. and he was on his way. 3 days later ( first chance I got to try it) it was the same thing. I had a ping of over 3700 on my CS server. I called back and asked them to check our ping. Sure enough they said it wasslow. I asked to try a neighbor or two, she said she couldn't..

So anyway, tech comes back out( same one) he has no clue but does agree that it's still slow....

I call again and talk to a rep. He says our connection is fine. While he is pinging our house I join my CS server and proceed to get a 3500 ping. But he says there is nothing wrong. He pings our neighbor ( not sure why the other one couldn't) and he says theirs are all good as well. I ask him about my ping and he has no clue why it would do it. My wife also gets disconnected from her VPN on occasion.

So I started to do some tracert to my server.

It says pinging over a 30 rt hoop. ( or something like that) It times out until the 9th try then it finally comes back at 25-40. I was going to try doing that to numerous sites and then mail them some of my findings.

What else can I do to prove that there really is a problem. I can ping my router from my side and get a 1ms and I also get a 1ms when I ping the modem from my side so I think it's on their side. How do I take a screen shot of my command prompt? I want these people to know that there really is a problem and I want it fixed now.

Thanks.

 

[narzy]

can you paste a copy of your traceroute please. I work for Comcast, I don't do customer relation, I am a Network Security Administrator, but I do happen to interact with the rest of the company, and have a few connections , I'll see what I can do, if anything. it sounds like the 2nd tech you got was throwing poo at you to get you to go away, unfortunatly the company hires / outsources tech support that don't give a damn about the customers, or the management of the locations have that mindset and make it very difficult for the rest of us who end up sweeping up the mess.

again I'll see what I can do, but that tracert would be very handy, might identify if its one of our servers foobaring along the way and if it is, it should be an easy fix / trouble ticket to the server's location.

 

[Stallion]

Well the bad news is I'm at work right now but I can mail it in the morning. But how do I do a copy/paste from the command prompt. My wife is the network guru but she is very busy studying for her CCNP and since it is mostly affects me I would like to try and fix it.


Thanks for your help Narzy.

 

[Genx87]

Have them check the signal strength. Have you noticed your cable TV coming in fuzzy or not at all on some channels?

Sounds exactly like the problem I was having.

 

[Stallion]

TV has been fine as far as I know. You had problems as well?

 

[ktwebb]

"But how do I do a copy/paste from the command prompt."

Print Screen and paste to photo editor/viewer. Save as jpeg instead of the default bitmap and send it.

 

[jbritt1234]

To copy/paste from the command prompt_

Click on the little Icon on the top left side of the window. Go down to edit, then choose select all. Then go back and copy and paste into notepad or whatever.

Comcast is the root of ALL evil!!! GOOD LUCK!!!

 

[Stallion]

Narzy, I'm also having trouble with sending mail. I can reply to mail but for some reason I can't send it. But if you mail me first i can send you some of the tracerts I did. It took 17 tries before it got to Anand. It timed out 16 times.

My mail is bubbastallion@attbi.com

Thanks

 

[TJN23]

if its a surfboard modem (or most others) surf to http://192.168.100.1 and check the signal levels...you want downstream signals to be around -15 to 15 and upstream signals to be < 58...preferably a lot lower...

This is also a good FAQ for cable signal issues

 

[narzy]

Originally posted by: Stallion
Narzy, I'm also having trouble with sending mail. I can reply to mail but for some reason I can't send it. But if you mail me first i can send you some of the tracerts I did. It took 17 tries before it got to Anand. It timed out 16 times.

My mail is bubbastallion@attbi.com

Thanks

you've got mail, I sent it through my "personal" account as I don't give out my work account to anyone outside the corp. nor is non corp E-mail allowed to be recived through it (lil sumthin I whipped up.)

also a drop at hop 16 is most likely out of our network and there is very little to nothing we can do about another locations servers. I'm also look to see what call center you got, to trace from their location to your modem to further locate any issues.

 

[Stallion]

You got mail.

 

[wetcat007]

I've had this problem with roadrunner, tech support is conviced all 4 computers I tried with it, are all screwed up and that's the problem, and it really pisses me off, however after doing some work I figured out that it's their modem, so I gotta try and get them to send me a new one now.

 

[narzy]

ewww that aint right willis. tech number 2 sooo needs to be fired. there is no way in hell he didn't see this. that is weird as a mother too. I've seen it before but not to this extent. let me scratch my head and think about it, and get ahold of the guys that run things in your location aswell, have a nice friendly conference call and see what we can do to help you out.

I know they've asked you this (or they should have) are you behind any type of firewall, or have any firewall software install, if so what? also how many computers are sharing the connection, no worries I won't tell . not that a firewall should matter unless you've recently installed it, upgraded, or change the configuration. it looks to me like our routing server there has gone completely nuts! What I might have you try, is connecting with a different DNS server, tho that probably won't fix your problem, its definatly our side, and my initial guess is that its our server.

 

[narzy]

Originally posted by: wetcat007
I've had this problem with roadrunner, tech support is conviced all 4 computers I tried with it, are all screwed up and that's the problem, and it really pisses me off, however after doing some work I figured out that it's their modem, so I gotta try and get them to send me a new one now.

from what I understand in the tech logs, what Stallion has tould me, and the support call logs, we've replace his modem once already, he could have gotten 2 duds, or the config file isn't being uploaded correctly or 1 of a 100 things could be out of whack, thats what so fun about networks...but when I have free time (my lunch hour) I'll dedicate it to trying and solving the issue. . no worries, I have no social lunch life .

 

[Stallion]

Narzy you are the friggin man.

We have a linksys wireless router, that's the only firewall we use. It had been fine for along time then it just started to go south slowly about a month ago but has since gone down hill real fast. The linksys has been on for more then a year and nothing has been changed.

Right now we only have 3 PCs hooked up to it. My PC I game on. Wifes work laptop and a laptop we keep down stairs. Both lap tops are wireless. MY PC is on 24/7 Wifes laptop is on about 6-8 hours a day and the other laptop is on 24/7 but when we are off the net we pull out the card.

The most we have had hooked up to it is 4 total but that was more then 6 months ago.

The first time the tech came out he swapped the modem. The next time he came by he swapped one in just to see if he did give us a bad one the first time but it still ran like crap so he removed it.

Thanks so much for the help.

 

[bUnMaNGo]

that's great... AT's very own Comcast technician... now if only we had a resident Adelphia tech...

 

[Stallion]

It's nice to get personal help. No wonder so many people come here and stay here.

 

[Stallion]

Still working like crap. I thought it was fixed. I started to play some CS and my ping was 50-60 for about 15 minutes then sure as shiat. Up to 2000 it climbed. :brokenheart:

 

[Chadder007]

Did you ever check the signal strength by going to 192.168.100.1 ??

 

[narzy]

ya there still working on it.

lets see if we can't fix it quickly by connecting the modem directly too your PC instead of to the router then doing a tracert to www.anandtech.com, www.google.com and www.yahoo.com .pluging in your computer to the modem instead of the router won't affect your service (aka MAC address filtering we do) as I've cleared your account to do it. just to make sure the router isn't our problem, I've checked the config file, its fine, the only other issue is one of our routers being loopie. But I always like to rule out client-side problems first .

As far as your E-mail problem, I'll look into it, thats extremely odd.

 

[Fallen Kell]

Wow.. this sounds like my life at work I'm a sys admin and the answer from the network guys is always "The network is fine. There are no problems with it. Its your systems." It then takes us a day to get one of the network admins to come over and we then spend an hour proving to him that it IS the network and that our systems are fine

In anycase, comcast is a decent company once you get past tier 1 tech support My last problem was a reverse DNS lookup issue on comcast's DNS servers. The conversation with tier 1 support was almost commical, cause I already new the cause of the problem and I just needed them to transfer my call up to tier 2 or 3 support so I could talk to the real techs. Once I made it to that level the tech couldn't believe that I figured out the problem in the first place, but sure enough, when he checked the DNS server configuration, it was incorrectly setup for my dns name/ip on reverse lookups. He then asked what I did for a living and I let him know I do pretty much the same job he has, just for a business

 

[Stallion]

Same thing with no modem.

Microsoft(R) Windows DOS
(C)Copyright Microsoft Corp 1990-2001.

C:\DOCUME~1\BUBBA>tracfert www.anandtech.com
'TRACFERT' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

C:\DOCUME~1\BUBBA>tracert www.anandtech.com

Tracing route to www.anandtech.com [168.143.107.162]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 * * * Request timed out.
2 * * * Request timed out.
3 * * * Request timed out.
4 * * * Request timed out.
5 * * * Request timed out.
6 * * * Request timed out.
7 * * * Request timed out.
8 * * * Request timed out.
9 * * * Request timed out.
10 * * * Request timed out.
11 * * * Request timed out.
12 * * * Request timed out.
13 * * * Request timed out.
14 * * * Request timed out.
15 * * * Request timed out.
16 * * * Request timed out.
17 94 ms 88 ms 101 ms 168.143.107.162

Trace complete.

C:\DOCUME~1\BUBBA>tracert www.google.com

Tracing route to www.google.com [216.239.39.99]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 * * * Request timed out.
2 * * * Request timed out.
3 * * * Request timed out.
4 * * * Request timed out.
5 * * * Request timed out.
6 * * * Request timed out.
7 * * * Request timed out.
8 * * * Request timed out.
9 * * * Request timed out.
10 * * * Request timed out.
11 * * * Request timed out.
12 * * * Request timed out.
13 * * * Request timed out.
14 * * * Request timed out.
15 * * * Request timed out.
16 87 ms 87 ms 88 ms 216.239.39.99

Trace complete.

C:\DOCUME~1\BUBBA>tracert www.yahoo.com

Tracing route to www.yahoo.akadns.net [66.218.71.81]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 * * * Request timed out.
2 * * * Request timed out.
3 * * * Request timed out.
4 * * * Request timed out.
5 * * * Request timed out.
6 * * * Request timed out.
7 * * * Request timed out.
8 * * * Request timed out.
9 * * * Request timed out.
10 * * * Request timed out.
11 * * * Request timed out.
12 * * * Request timed out.
13 61 ms 39 ms 46 ms w2.scd.yahoo.com [66.218.71.81]

Trace complete.

C:\DOCUME~1\BUBBA>

Damn.

 

[narzy]

well knock me in the nuts...I really do think its a network problem and I have a trouble ticket out on it currently, they've called me a few times concerning the matter I don't think they have a clue as to whats going on...(thats the thing about working for a new company, people rotate in and out so we have to get to know each other, and each others capabilities...) I'm working on it aswell, but my roaming access is limited, I have to have a real (somthing that I can do that they can't...) reason to be messing with equipment outside my area. I'll think of some other things client side, just to test out.

Fallen Kell; tier1 in our company, I belive is still outsourced to canada, so they don't know their head from their ass if it isn't a simple problem, and they have been tould to minimize tier 2 transfers...we don't have a tier3...

 

[narzy]

as for your mail problems, I wouldn't be supprised if its due to the other problem.

 

[Genx87]

This was last fall and one a different cable provider. Internet seemed ok and my bandwidth was fine. But my latency was through the roof. 450-900 in any game.

Signal strength was coming in at 42db when it should of been 19db.