Come now...

Alright, so for the last couple to 3 weeks, we've been dealing with intermittent slow speeds through the day, and constant slow speed come 8pm EST.

What we're paying for over here is a 10 meg download, 0.6meg upload DSL package (it's the BEST speeds available ... not to mention the ONLY "high speed" internet "option" to us). What we're getting through the day mostly is relatively O.K. ... 9-10 meg download, and steady 0.6 upload. Granted, randomly through the day, the connection will drop (no lights going out on the modem or anything mind you, just poof, no net for you) completely. Sometimes we'll get a short decrease in our speeds, but it won't last too long.

NO, we're not downloading pron, or any torrenting going on, so it's nothing internal to the network at all. The only "stressful" connection is watching Twitch ... When everything is fine and dandy, I can watch a stream AT BEST, on Medium quality.

Now, I've been calling and complaining about the speed drop at the times above, and have not spoken with two supervisors about this issue. My first call to complain, the technician fiddled with the internal settings of the modem to turn off the wireless and failed to turn it back on. When I went back into the modem myself to turn that back on, the modem's internal setting showed that yes, it was on, however the light on the modem was off. Devices that connected wirelessly could not locate the signal at all even being right next to the modem. Called again the next day and was told the modem must have gone bad, and of course needed to be replaced. "We can get one sent out to you and it will be there in 3 to 5 days, and we'll need to charge $19.95..." woah woah ... I'm not paying for your broken equipment people. Seeing as that was a weekend, the local office / sales store was closed until Monday. Went in, got a replacement modem, installed it that day, plopped in the wireless settings, everything good to go. Until that night of course around 8pm when the speed dropped to poo again.

Que another call to service, technician states that something must be wrong with the modem, and would need to do a hard reset on it... WAIT a moment there dude... the modem just got installed... "resetting to default" isn't going to fix anything now will it? this prompted them to get a technician set up to come out...which wouldn't be until later in the week (Wednesday I think it was?). Tech comes out, checks the line at the box outside the house, hears static, and whatnot. He explains that there's actually TWO KNOWN stretches of line that service our area that are bad.

This is the same tech that we've had out on previous issues with the net here, wherein one of the previous visits, he had to put in a new connection whatever in the DSLAM that we were connected to supposedly... something that he could then come out and check reports from whatever he was putting in to be able to see the issues we were having back then (slow speeds / intermittent connection, go figure). He stated that it's obviously not something internal to the house, and it's all on their side of things, and he would be trying to put us over to a different pair to hopefully fix the issue, and that he would call me back on my cell phone that night, or the next day when he finished this pair swap. I did NOT receive a call back though.

I call again on this past Saturday because ... lo and behold... around 6:30 this time... the net went to poo. I asked for a supervisor at that time, but the tech basically refused to do that, and wanted to try some stuff himself... one thing in particular was resetting the modem to default settings. I told him that the modem had JUST been installed on Monday... it shouldn't need that ... his response was "there are old errors in the modem so a hard reset will clear them" ... how can you call some errors that are less than a week old ... OLD? ... anyway ... he resets the modem... then he can't get back into the modem through their tools ... YAY! ... I tell him again that it's nothing that HE can do, get me a supervisor so this can get escalated properly, he explains that a supervisor would just be putting in a support ticket to have a tech come out again... whatever, get a tech out....tech scheduled for Monday ('cause yep, no tech calls on weekends). Supposed to have a tech out by 5pm Monday.

Monday rolls around, around 9-10 A.M., the net completely drops (modem lights actually drop during this time). I figure maybe the guy forgot to swap the pair like he said he was going to do, and is doing it at that time. No phone call to either the house line, or my cell (as requested). 5pm rolls around with no contact still, but I figure meh, it was down earlier, maybe it's fixed. Nope... 8pm, poof, 1meg download. call AGAIN ... get an actual supervisor this time. I'm on the phone for over 45 minutes with the supervisor alone trying to fix this issue, see where the problem lies so that it can properly have a maintenance call on. He can't get the performance information for the server that we're connected to, so he can't see if it's having issues load-balancing or if it's a port issue or what's going on. He states more than likely it's something with the server itself and it needs maintenance, and he'd let me go seeing as we were on the call for so long, and he'd go through and poll other customers in the area to see if they're having the same issues. He stated that I should get a call back by 5pm today (Wednesday the 26th).

Nope, no call, between then and now. I start watching and testing net speeds around 6pm every half hour or so, just to see when things started to go south for us.

• 6:00pm: download 9.5meg
• 6:30pm: download 9.0
• 7:00pm: download 8.0 (20% of speed at this point, what they are supposed to at LEAST get us)
• 7:30pm: download 7.3
• 8:00pm: download 5.0
• 8:10pm: download 2.4

Ok, that's enough, time to call ... get another supervisor ... they state that the ticket that was opened by the supervisor was closed because the "reason" he'd put in was "packet loss" ... why that? well, because the server and modem are showing that supposedly they're talking at 11meg down, 0.7meg up ... so THAT shows things are fine supposedly. The packet loss at this point in time of day are only 5%-7% packet loss ... NOT ENOUGH for them to warrant an issue to look at stuff! So, this new supervisor gets on with the maintenance tech department and they're trying to poll people around the area to see if they're having issues or if it's just us. Go figure, supposedly no-one's getting the same problem as us. After an HOUR of being on the phone with him, he gets a new ticket to try to move us to a different DSLAM bar or what the fark ever in the box that we're connected to. This is now supposed to happen in two days (Friday) ... So, let's see how this goes! ... oh... and here, this is a test I did when I started writing this...

So yea... grade F ... let's test again now... roughly 40 minutes later... 

hmm... that looks to me like we've gotten SLOWER ... yea... I'd say that this is a progressive drop in speed as described to technicians on the phone, that have come to the house, and supervisors! ... This is OBVIOUSLY something wrong with the server balancing the load when loads of people start getting online at the same time.

Meanwhile, the ONLY way I can watch streams on twitch right now without stupid buffering... is on MOBILE quality ... I can't even watch on LOW ... tell me, how is

supposed to be enjoyable? I'd put in a DVD to watch but yea...I don't have many to watch... and other reasons but that's beside the point for this post.

Here's hoping that SOMETHING gets fixed soon... this is getting redonkulous over here. I've not been able to play FFXIV (what I'm trying to watch someone do is something that I should be doing too soon, and I wanna freaking learn so I'm not clueless when we get to it) due to the inconsistencies and unstable nature of the net right now. I can't reliably tank anything if I can't see when things leave my side, or go after other players because everything downstream sometimes takes 5 seconds to update on my end... by that time, poof, someone's dead!