How to confront ISP when they are definitely in the wrong?

[natto fire]

Hello,

So I do not pay the internet bill, to start the thread off right. I was asked to diagnose the problem here, and I immediately did in the latency and routing.

Our ISP. qwest, seems to bounce our packets around between 4 or 5 different local servers with latency in the area of 600ms or more, which of course affects our speed. Total throughput is actually not bad, but I am more after the latency because a lot of people use this connection.

I live in a VERY low density pop area, and know where the switching station is (about 1.5-2mi from me). I have about 4 other contacts that go through that same station and they have all told me different things to get better speed. The only thing I haven't tried is call the ISP, because I hate to be a "Californian" and call up without exhausting all the resources at my disposal.

There are 3 routers serving here, and they have all been updated to newest firmware. I have even upgraded one with dd-wrt to see if the router was the problem. After many traceroutes, I found out it is the ISP.

Of course, I don't have the time for a tech to tell me to reboot my computer or to listen to their head explode when I tell them there are 5 other users and describe our network topology.

Has anyone had any success with a key combination or something that you could get someone that is not a total fucking retard?

I hoped that the screenshots, (which are on my netbook, lent out) would seal it. ANT is not working for me in Win7 to duplicate the results.

 

[theevilsharpie]

You're way overthinking this.

Run a pathping on a computer that's having issues. Does it show that your ISP's hops have unusually high latency or packet loss? If so, save your results and call them.

I hate to be a "Californian"...

 

[Emulex]

they probably know they have oversold their circuit and don't care to be reminded of what they know nor acknowledge it.

hardest part is convincing bellsouth once that a peering partner has a bad gbic/nic and they need to reroute their traffic or make the other peering company fix the problem lol. thankfully i had servers on both sides to present the issues and the other side worked with me to debug AND i was a business class T-1 customer which counts for alot with bellsouth. nobody will give a consumer user the time of day.

 

[nboy22]

The first problem is it's qwest. Qwest has horrible latency due to the way they route things. For instance here in Phoenix, it takes a few hops and then hops to their main station which is in COLORADO!!! so it has this HUGGGGEEE hop it has to make which makes no sense whatsoever. Combine that with their interleaving technology (error correction technology) which also increases the latency greatly, you've got yourself a huge latency problem.

My recommendation would be to just drop it. No one is going to fix it at qwest, I can pretty much guarentee it. ISPs do not operate and cater to just 1 customer like that, they never do. For example, back when I lived in Idaho I had cableone in my area. I had cable through them for like 3 or 4 years with no issues, then all of a sudden they started finishing my neighborhood and building a ton of homes. They started overloading their equipment/amplifiers and one of them went out every 40 minutes, and when it went out, it would take at least 1 hour for it to come back on. I called them and told them exactly what the problem was, but they ignore it/have no way of communicating with the field techs because they are just phone support and the ISPs never design their systems that way (I worked at 2wire for 2 years and know how things go in internet phone tech support.) So then they send a tech out to my house, I repeat to him that my house is not the problem because it was fine for years before. The field tech changed some wires in my garage, I basically just wanted to call him a dumbass because it would make no logical sense that wires would just all of a sudden become bad in my garage area. Wires just don't go "bad" by themselves...

Fast forward to 1-2 years down the line when I was attending college, my dad calls me and tells me they finally fixed the amplifier. This could have been completely avoided had the ISP just listened to me in the first place.

Another problem with qwest is that you cannot multitask on a connection. I used to have the qwest 12 meg fiber to the node (another dumbass mistake by qwest) They are just trying rush and get into the fiber game, but they should have gone with FTTP instead of FTTN. I would be downloading on my newsgroups at full speed and couldn't even play my xbox online, hell, I couldn't even surf the web. They call this "normal." Well, if it's so normal, then why don't I have that problem with my Cox cable connection? I will never, ever ever use qwest again.

So straight up, stop wasting time and just switch your ISP to a cable provider if possible. If it's not possible, well good luck to you my friend, but you'll just probably have to live with the horrible latency till something better comes along in the area. DSL is old technology and not even worth getting. Remember, DSL was created as a way for the phone providers (AT&T and Qwest) to get in on the internet business. The cable systems were already owned by other companies so they needed DSL to create more profits.

 

[Absolution75]

I had a similar problem with time warner cable. The internet would screech to a halt around five thirty at night, when everyone was getting home.

Called their tech support at least once a day for a week. The key thing here is to get your support ticket elevated - the normal people don't know anything besides the general reboot modem, router, pc and some basic ping and trace route tests. Makes aence though because that is the majority of issues.

Persistence is key. Support calls and visits by technicians costs them money, eventually more than it would cost to continue ignoring the problem.

 

[theevilsharpie]

My recommendation would be to just drop it. No one is going to fix it at qwest, I can pretty much guarentee it. ISPs do not operate and cater to just 1 customer like that, they never do.

Well, if we're going to share our experiences, I had a similar problem with Verizon DSL, where latency shot through the roof and packet loss averaged about 15% after going through a certain part of Verizon's regional network. I called in, reported the problem, and after some testing, they acknowledged the problem was on their end. It was fixed 30 minutes later.

The ISP MIGHT NOT fix the OP's problem to his liking, but they certainly WILL NOT fix the problem if the OP doesn't report it.

He just needs to call his ISP already.

/thread

 

[drebo]

hardest part is convincing bellsouth once that a peering partner has a bad gbic/nic and they need to reroute their traffic or make the other peering company fix the problem lol. thankfully i had servers on both sides to present the issues and the other side worked with me to debug AND i was a business class T-1 customer which counts for alot with bellsouth. nobody will give a consumer user the time of day.

I had to get Global Crossing to reroute our traffic once. That sucked. They had a bad interface with a provider that one of our customers uses and it resulted in 20 seconds of unreachability every 10 minutes or so. We almost lost the customer because of that whole debacle.