Recent Headlines
October 2, 2009
Be Sure to Read Part One: Astroturf Overload — Broadband for America = One Giant Industry Front Group for an important introduction to what this super-sized industry front group is all about.
Members of Broadband for America
Red: A company or group actively engaging in anti-consumer lobbying, opposes Net Neutrality, supports Internet Overcharging, belongs to an astroturf [...]
October 2, 2009
Astroturf: One of the underhanded tactics increasingly being used by telecom companies is “Astroturf lobbying” – creating front groups that try to mimic true grassroots, but that are all about corporate money, not citizen power. Astroturf lobbying is hardly a new approach. Senator Lloyd Bentsen is credited with coining the term in the 1980s to [...]
September 27, 2009
Hong Kong remains bullish on broadband. Despite the economic downturn, City Telecom continues to invest millions in constructing one of Hong Kong’s largest fiber optic broadband networks, providing fiber to the home connections to residents. City Telecom’s HK Broadband service relies on an all-fiber optic network, and has been dubbed “the Verizon FiOS of [...]
September 23, 2009
BendBroadband, a small provider serving central Oregon, breathlessly announced the imminent launch of new higher speed broadband service for its customers after completing an upgrade to DOCSIS 3. Along with the launch announcement came a new logo of a sprinting dog the company attaches its new tagline to: “We’re the local dog. We better be [...]
September 23, 2009
Stop the Cap! reader Rick has been educating me about some of the new-found aggression by Shaw Communications, one of western Canada’s largest telecommunications companies, in expanding its business reach across Canada. Woe to those who get in the way.
Novus Entertainment is already familiar with this story. As Stop the Cap! reported previously, Shaw launched [...]
September 22, 2009
The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission, the Canadian equivalent of the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, may be forced to consider American broadband policy before defining Net Neutrality and its role in Canadian broadband, according to an article published today in The Globe & Mail.
[FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski's] proposal – to codify and enforce some general [...]
September 21, 2009
In March 2000, two cable magnates sat down for the cable industry equivalent of My Dinner With Andre. Fine wine, beautiful table linens, an exquisite meal, and a Monopoly board with pieces swapped back and forth representing hundreds of thousands of Canadian consumers. Ted Rogers and Jim Shaw drew a line on the western Ontario [...]
September 11, 2009
Just like FairPoint Communications, the Towering Inferno of phone companies haunting New England, Frontier Communications is making a whole lot of promises to state regulators and consumers, if they’ll only support the deal to transfer ownership of phone service from Verizon to them.
This time, Frontier is issuing a self-serving press release touting their investment of [...]
September 7, 2009
I see it took all of five minutes for George Ou and his friends at Digital Society to be swayed by the tunnel vision myopia of last week’s latest effort to justify Internet Overcharging schemes.
Until recently, I’ve always rationalized my distain for smaller usage caps by ignoring the fact that I’m being subsidized by the [...]
September 1, 2009
In 2007, we took our first major trip away from western New York in 20 years and spent two weeks an hour away from Calgary, Alberta.
After two weeks in Kananaskis Country, Banff, Calgary, and other spots all over southern Alberta, we came away with the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:
The Good
Alberta is like [...]
August 31, 2009
A federal appeals court in Washington has struck down, for a second time, a rulemaking by the Federal Communications Commission to limit the size of the nation’s largest cable operators to 30% of the nation’s pay television marketplace, calling the rule “arbitrary and capricious.”
The 30% rule, designed to keep no single company from controlling more [...]
August 27, 2009
Less than half of Americans surveyed by PC Magazine report they are very satisfied with the broadband speed delivered by their Internet service provider.
PC Magazine released a comprehensive study this month on speed, provider satisfaction, and consumer opinions about the state of broadband in their community.
The publisher sampled more than 17,000 participants, checking their actual [...]
Subscribe
I don’t have any solid evidence to back this up, but it seems as though my connection has been in the dumps for several days. Pages that normally load very fast (like You Tube) are terribly slow as frequently are my downloads of late.
Is the network simply congested? Am I being punished for being a member of Stop the Cap!? Am I just paranoid (I don’t know)?
In any case, it’s very annoying and I’m sure even more so for you because you not only have a server but pay for the extra speed (which I don’t anymore – not since the capping fiasco).
I have a very new modem so I don’t think that’s it. I’ll try to devise a way to measure my speed over the next week and see where I stand.
Good to know it’s not just me.
We are documenting some interesting readings and things on our side here, so there is more to this story than I have shared at the moment. You might want to note your IP address (ever since ours switched to 74.74.x.x we’ve noticed slower speeds), and do some inside/outside RR network speed tests.
Our speedtest within RR’s network was showing absolutely normal speeds in certain cases, but as soon as we tested using the New England or Binghamton server, the speeds fell to the 1Mbps range. Upload speed was never impacted.
http://speedtest.twrochester.com/speedtest.php
This is for Rochester/upstate NY… but see if you get radically different readings for Buffalo/Rochester/Syracuse vs. New England and Binghamton. We were.
Our problems started Saturday night.
Yeah, I was going to do the inside/outside test as the internal network is always lightning fast but external tests to Toronto, San Diego or Japan are usually significantly different (though Toronto is usually still pretty fast ~10Mbps down).
I didn’t notice an IP address change lately since I have a domain name that points to my home box primarily for ssh access and that hasn’t been impacted in months. I don’t use dyndns, I just update it manually at my registrar’s page because it changes so infrequently and I want to know when it changes.
I did not test all of them but speakeasy speeds are normal for me.
Just checked all of TWC’s speed locations. All normal 6.0 to 6.75
~375 U
My IP is not 74.74
Brion you know better then that…congested. Ether a cute little fuzzy
critter that eats nuts and wires got in or you two got the TWC warning
shot.
This is what my neighborhood was seeing, added in with 500+ms latency back when Time Warner was performing node splits, and also still today when many people are online. DOCSIS 3.0 coming soon? Who knows…
For the most part, might as well post up a trace route to find out what the problem might be exactly. In my area, it’s typically the first hop ping (CMTS) which is where things hit the fan first. None the less, if it is a Rochester-network wide issue, Buffalo’s traffic all has to go through Rochester, NY for whatever reason so I can see if things hit the fan yet again in my neighborhood and where.
Buffalo routes directly to the NOC in Syracuse now. That nyroc in the traceroute is NY Regional Operations Center. There is no apparent packet loss or other indications of problems for traffic movement… it’s just very slow for downloads. Here is my tracert to stopthecap:
1 9 ms 12 ms 9 ms cable-mac1-0.rochnybtn-ar403.nyroc.rr.com [74.74.xxx.x]
2 10 ms 9 ms 9 ms gig9-0-2.rochnybtn-rtr01.nyroc.rr.com [24.93.5.117]
3 18 ms 19 ms 18 ms ge-6-0-0.albynywav-rtr03.nyroc.rr.com [24.92.224.122]
4 22 ms 35 ms 22 ms ae-5-0.cr0.nyc30.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.74]
5 25 ms 25 ms 60 ms ae-1-0.pr0.nyc20.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.163]
6 38 ms 24 ms 25 ms te1-4.mpd01.jfk05.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.13.185]
7 26 ms 24 ms 25 ms te2-4.ccr01.jfk02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.6.49]
8 25 ms 41 ms 25 ms te7-1.ccr02.jfk02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.25.150]
9 41 ms 57 ms 41 ms te4-4.ccr02.ord01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.29.153]
10 48 ms 46 ms 47 ms te4-2.ccr01.stl03.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.27.30]
11 52 ms 48 ms 49 ms vl3802.na31.b016110-1.stl03.atlas.cogentco.com [66.28.5.246]
12 54 ms 57 ms 57 ms 38.104.162.22
13 54 ms 53 ms 53 ms 209-20-79-17.slicehost.net [209.20.79.17]
14 53 ms 54 ms 55 ms mail.stopthecap.com [67.207.131.22]
Here is my current speed test through Road Runner’s own local server:
After running all the tests TW has to offer I found Rochester to have speed problems (struggled to get to 15Mbps and sometimes hung around 10 or 11Mbps. But almost all the other locations (Syracuse, Albany, Binghamton, and Buffalo) shot straight to 19.95Mbps and stayed there.
New England continuously was in error and failed to run the test at all.
Are you friends with your neighbors? Have you asked them if their Internet is slow as well?
My father lives about six houses down from me and I was over there testing this morning. He had no issues at all.
I honestly wouldn’t know what’s going on with that. The trace route looks pretty similar to what my neighbor got when I asked him to trace a website for me, and I know with a cable modem the latency isn’t as consistent in a trace route as DSL/Fiber tends to be. Today was a good night for Roadrunner in my neighborhood as he also pulled 28Mbps download, 2Mbps upload on his connection with a latency of 20ms. I wouldn’t know what’s going on other than saying there might be an issue going on with an edge router. None the less, I don’t know how Roadrunner has their network set up as much as I do with Verizon/Frontier so I’m drawing blanks too.
But I didn’t know about the routing changes that took place. I could’ve sworn just two weeks ago when I was on a Roadrunner connection I saw a trace route go right through Rochester and then to Syracuse.
Verizon I know as of late has been having some issues with FiOS and people reporting packet loss issues and slow speeds. Those have settled down recently. More recently, as of today apparently DSL Reports are having their line monitors get hosed. Level 3 is apparently hosing up the results and the New Jersey Line Monitor is apparently routing to Chicago before it even gets anywhere. Just take a look at my DSLR line monitor overnight (ignore the large spike around the evening. I’m seeding Ubuntu torrents still).
East Coast > http://ny-monitor.dslreports.com/r3/cricket/grapher?target=/ping-pktloss/244467&range=d:w
West Coast > http://64.81.79.40/r3/cricket/grapher?target=/ping-pktloss/244467&range=d:w
Take note especially with the East Coast line monitor, that due to the routing changes the latency doubled between my Verizon connection and the line monitoring server. The connection was idle at that time as well. I’ll be setting up a line monitor on the Frontier connection soon enough to see how that’s doing.
I suspected this would happen. The evening before the service call, the speed problem suddenly disappeared. Notice the traceroute reveals nothing dramatically different about the path traffic followed, and the updated speed test is a big improvement. Hmmmm…..
1 12 ms 14 ms 11 ms cable-mac1-0.rochnybtn-ar403.nyroc.rr.com [74.74.xxx.x]
2 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms gig9-0-2.rochnybtn-rtr01.nyroc.rr.com [24.93.5.117]
3 18 ms 18 ms 19 ms ge-6-0-0.albynywav-rtr03.nyroc.rr.com [24.92.224.122]
4 33 ms 24 ms 23 ms ae-5-0.cr0.nyc30.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.74]
5 28 ms 26 ms 25 ms ae-1-0.pr0.nyc20.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.163]
6 26 ms 25 ms 25 ms te1-4.mpd01.jfk05.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.13.185]
7 24 ms 25 ms 25 ms te2-4.ccr01.jfk02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.6.49]
8 40 ms 25 ms 25 ms te7-1.ccr02.jfk02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.25.150]
9 44 ms 40 ms 43 ms te4-4.ccr02.ord01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.29.153]
10 48 ms 48 ms 47 ms te4-2.ccr01.stl03.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.27.30]
11 70 ms 49 ms 50 ms vl3802.na31.b016110-1.stl03.atlas.cogentco.com [66.28.5.246]
12 54 ms 57 ms 66 ms 38.104.162.22
13 55 ms 55 ms 53 ms 209-20-79-17.slicehost.net [209.20.79.17]
14 53 ms 55 ms 55 ms mail.stopthecap.com [67.207.131.22]
I’m getting odd results myself, but very different from yours. I have one torrent running currently whose download speed is fluctuating between 70kbps and 600kbps with upload speeds between 20kbps to 1.6mbps! Very odd. I also seem to be unable to open any ports, which is strange.
Just…wow tonight:
Update: While Roadrunner did appear to have some problems on the 9th, I’ve come to determine that my slow ping response (15 sec. for 4 x 50ms pings) was due to my Ubuntu Karmic Koala IPv6 configuration and old router firmware.
In a nutshell Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) made some changes that uses IPv6 by default which is fine until you’re sitting behind some DNS resolver that doesn’t handle IPv6 (as my primary router’s DNS resolver doesn’t) which introduces around a 5 second delay for every DNS lookup. Suffice it to say it made the web like dial-up and that was part of my slowness problem.
If anyone else has Ubuntu 9.10 and has slow Internet you can do one of two things:
1. change /etc/resolv.conf to use your ISP’s DNS nameservers instead of your router, or
2. email me deadbeefb5 =at= gmail.com and I’ll give you additional suggestions or explain in more detail how to do #1.
Cheers!
Speakeasy to Seattle:
Download Speed: 787 kbps (98.4 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 306 kbps (38.3 KB/sec transfer rate)
to Atlanta:
Download Speed: 8491 kbps (1061.4 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 367 kbps (45.9 KB/sec transfer rate)
to New York:
Download Speed: 9383 kbps (1172.9 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 370 kbps (46.3 KB/sec transfer rate)
I seem to be getting the best connection to New York, and both it and Atlanta are WAY over the 5 Mbps I should get. ???
I don’t even have a local speedtest for TWC to check.
I’m on a 72.230.241.0 network.
Also interesting is myself and two friends within a 3 block radius are all on separate class A networks: 72, 74, and 69.
A little more info…
My network is comprised of two subnets – one wired and one wireless. The Internet enters the wireless router and goes to the wired router.
I tested two machines (one wired and one wireless) using speedtest.net and TW’s speed test as well as pingtest.net. I also tested three operating systems – Mac, Windows 7, and Ubuntu 9.10. Only Ubuntu demonstrated a real lag between pings as shown above. All ping times were between 50 and 100ms (which is normal).
The speed test showed between 16Mbps and 20Mbps for all three OSes but loading the main Google page in Linux was dog slow for some unexplained reason. This is particularly strange because Linux and Windows 7 share the same physical machine in a dual boot configuration.
So this time I think I’m going to chalk it up to something strange with Linux since I’m not seeing the 1Mbps that Phil is. However I routinely have my network connection interrupted in Windows when I’m using Skype or playing Demigod online – a game with P2P network code. I doubt it’s my modem since it was just replaced a month or so ago.
I’m getting 9.36-13.48Mbps (depending on server). My IP is 72.230.
You may want to check your speeds against another RR-located speedtest site: http://speedtest.texas.rr.com
I’m on Comcast (which appears to take Level3 to the speedtest site) and I’m able to pull (PowerBoosted) 35 Mbps down and ~9.8 Mbps up off of that test. So since the server is definitely not congested and it’s on RR’s network, it might be a good way to test out whether you’re getting crappy speeds overall or whether the speed test site is just sucking it up.
To texas.rr speedtest I got:
7710.66 kbps down
368.10 kbps up
98.x.x.x IP
Post-sudden-improvement… here is what I got:
Download Speed: 14778 kbps (1847.3 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 945 kbps (118.1 KB/sec transfer rate)
Latency: 62 ms
Nothing surprising with this one – about the same as the others:
Road Walker
Just got off the phone with a lady from TWC about TV problems, and TWC is doing a LOT tonight across the country on TV, internet, and phones. She wasn’t really sure what they were doing, but were doing something to all of them in different regions of the country.
I don’t even know why TWC has a Network Status page…it’s never helpful especially when it could be on nights like last night.
http://help.rr.com/HMSLogic/network_status.aspx
Just wait until you have a road runner problem and are not getting service and try to call TWC about it. I bet the first thing they tell you after “we do not detect and outage in your area”, is for you to check the network status page.
Remember, they are telling you to check a website, when you are calling about not having internet services. That is why they have the network status page. So the glorified secretaries that answer your customer call center have something to tell you when they have no real answers.
Don’t be hard on the support staff. They can only work with what they a given
and im sure they are not given much.