I don’t know if this belongs here or in a different forum so if it needs to be moved, please feel free to do so.
I have cable for my internet connection. Up until about a week ago, I could test my connection speeds at various testing sites and consistently get speeds of 3.0 Mbps to 3.6 Mbps, depending on which site I tested at. Therefore, I usually tested each time at 2 or 3 of them and took an average, which usually came out to about 3.1 Mbps overall. For the record, the advertised speed is 3.0 Mbps down.
About a week ago, my speeds slowed down to anywhere between 1.2 Mbps to 2.4 Mbps. I have done all of the troubleshooting tests at the cable companys site. Nothing shows up. I have scanned for viruses and spyware and came up empty. I have emptied the cache and history on both browsers I use (IE6 and Firefox). I’ve rebooted my cable modem (Motorola 5100). About the only thing I haven’t done is delete all my cookies, but since Adaware checks for bad cookies, I left what it didn’t find alone. I have no other issues with my PC other than my cable speed issue so I seriously doubt it is a problem with the PC. All cable connections are tight. As a last resort, I called the cable company. After working my way through the number tree, the lady picked up the phone, identified herself, and we got disconnected. :rolleyes: I’m not sure I want to go through that again. So, here I am. Any suggestions on what to look for next?
A wireless company just started up here and they are advertising 1.5 Mbps speeds for $19.99 per month for the 1st 3 months and $42.00 per month thereafter. If I am going to get that slow of speeds, I may as well go with them and save some money for at least 3 months.
Contact the cable company again. Seriously, dude. If there’s a problem in the area it might not be something they know about until they can get someone to check it, and giving up because the call terminated by accident once is a great way of getting no service at all. If you call back again and they check everything and say “No, it’s your problem” then sure, head over to the wireless company post-haste and get your savings there. But the cable company can’t fix a problem until they know about it, and you might find it’s something they can fix in a short period of time if you try the phones again.
It could be any number of things.
Based on my experience at the ISP I used to consult to, there could be a number of reasons:
Cable networks are shared - this means that if there’s one person on the cable, it’s lightning fast. Add another, and it slows down etc etc. Maybe they’ve added a bunch of people to the service in your street recently and haven’t gotten around to upgrading their network.
Ping attacks. We used to see these all the time. Even if you are not under attack yourself, the ISP may be. For a while, we were getting these daily in some cities. Our gateway routers couldn’t handle the load and slowed right down. Even if the ISP is filtering these before they get to the client (you) the network is still hurting.
Hardware faults. Yep, they happen. Catastrophic enough, and the hardware doesn’t get time to set off the “I’m dying now” alarms. They’re pretty rare though.
Do you have a firewall? Check the logs - your firewall may be stopping volumes of dodgy traffic (as it should), but which is slowing down your link.
There are thousands more reasons, but these are the first things that spring to my mind. We were working on the backend systems, not the call centres taking fault calls, but if one person complained, it wouldn’t even get to us. We’d only hear about if it was very widespread, or other unusual signs (such as lots of complaints coming from a single geographic area or username range etc etc).
I decided to call back to customer service. I got to where they say “your expected wait time is…” and they said 15 minutes. Since I only have a cell phone, I decided to wait for awhile, so I hung up. Due to the comments that Sierra Indigo made, I decided to go to the local cable office. It turns out that it is pretty much a city wide problem and they are working on it. So now I’m thinking that maybe I should have done that before I posted the OP. Sometimes I can be such a :wally :smack:
You’re not a :wally , frustrated maybe. It’s understandable. I don’t hit the phones unless I absolutely have to, because I hate dealing with the phone trees as well. But working for an ISP, it’s one of the worst things out to have someone call up and say “My internet’s not been working for a month and I don’t want to pay for that month and blah blah blah”, when they haven’t even called once to find out if it’s something we can fix or not. And as robinc308 said, the 2nd level and hardware techs don’t even get a fault put through until a certain number of customers in the area have complained, and of course if they’re not calling to do that then the fault doesn’t get logged and the problem doesn’t get fixed.
Glad to see it is something they’re trying to fix for you, though.