I want to go back to Centurylink. A family drama, followed by a rant. Finishing with insight.
My son was complaining about horrible internet. He called me and spent 5 minutes 19 seconds ranting at me about how awful this fiber internet was and that he would take CenturyLink DSL over it.
”I want to go back to CenturyLink!” Wow, those words cut deep. I spent the next two days doing hardware audits and diagnostics. I even got up at 3AM went to the Net253 vault and did testing binges (totally messing my sleep up, and I have huge bags under my eyes now). I tested for throughput and packet loss every 2 hours for 2 days straight.
What did I find? Net253 has no slowdowns, zero, nothing , Zilch. Perfection. We have excess bandwidth even during the peak hours of 9PM to 10:30PM.
So what was the problem? Clearly my son was upset and clearly his internet “sucked”. Dad rolled up his sleeves and dug into his computer. Turns out son had accidentally unplugged the ethernet cord from the back of his PC. He was using the onboard Wi-Fi adapter.. However, his “antennas” were not installed on his Wi-Fi adapter. He had such a weak connection that people moving through the home could affect its performance. Once we resolved his connection problems, the internet magically got better.
Moral of the story, if you have trouble with our internet service, it is likely a problem in your home. Actually, put a little stronger. It isn’t because I am slowing down or don’t have enough bandwidth to serve you. All the problems I see are in the Wi-Fi distribution in the homes. Technically, this is not my problem. But of course it is, because as the customer, you want your internet to work on your devices.
Historically, I have sold people routers that I found to be cost effective. However, I am going to re-evaluate what I offer to people and move up to higher performance routers. Why would I ask you to spend another $200 on a WiFi router? Because it is the most critical portion of the entire link. It is relatively easy to get 100 or 1000mbits to the gray box on the side of the home. Every home has a different challenge inside. Spending an extra $100 or $200 on a one time expense to avoid frustrations every day for the next five or more years? As an interesting comparison, Comcast has a “fricking awesome” cable modem Wi-Fi device. Why would Comcast install a $500+ router/Wi-Fi solution in your home? Because they don’t want service calls to debug your Wi-Fi.
edit - just after I posted this, Murphy kicked me in the teeth:
On the graph below you see the actual traffic over the past hour for Net253. This is all the traffic bundled together into a massive firehose of data. Around 9:05PM someone or something performed a malicious attack on our network. This resulted in 5 minutes of “capping”, note how flat the blue line is below. This is the the “Safety Stop” that KPUD has on our link so that I don’t bleed the county dry of all bandwidth (taking down 911 for example). As we got nailed with rogue traffic to our router, the amount of customer data (your Netflix, or XBox game) dropped off. This the pink trace on the line above. For reference, these traces represent over $1,250 per gigabit of traffic, so that blue flat peak line? That’s a $5,000 per month internet bill.
