*Sigh* So much for the great bandwidth experiment.

[elfs]

Omaha and I have apparently never gotten the bandwidth we paid for. Admittedly, we don't use it all that much, but I was paying for 1.5Mb/sec and apparently never got more that 800Kb/sec even when it was working well. For the last month, however, we've been getting terrible dropouts, service interruptions, and just plain poor bandwidth. It's hard to be a bittorrent user, even of just legal torrents, when the mean bandwidth basically tops out somewhere around the same speed as a 56Kb modem. For this I'm paying five times dialup speeds?

I like Speakeasy. They try not to be evil. They do a good job of not being evil. They tell me that it's Covad's fault, that Omaha and I are 19,600 feet from the transmission center and that's very far. But it wasn't this bad back in November. We weren't having to reboot the inbound router every ten minutes. We weren't getting complete failures.

I think what happened is after the windstorm last month something happened to the lines and now they're terribly noisy and Covad doesn't want to acknowledge that their service now sucks.

I just want it fixed.

Comments

blame quest...

[-pollox.livejournal.com]

Even if you have Covad on a dedicated line, they're still leasing it from Qwest (or whoever your local telco is). Since Covad is in competition with your local telco, said telco doesn't really have a good incentive to make sure the line quality is kept up...

Talk to Covad direct. Talk to your telco direct. If they don't fix it in a timely fashion, talk to (or at least tell the telco you're going to talk to) the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission - http://www.wutc.wa.gov/

They decide whether the telco can raise their rates and are always glad to heard about poor service - they have denied rate increases because of it...

Re: blame quest...

[kengr]

Actually, in some markets, Covad is who you are stuck with if the local phone company "can't" give you DSL.

If Comcast hadn't offered cable internet here, my *only* "high speed" option would have been a 128k IDSL line via Covad. At over $100/month

As I understand it, Covad is bad news if you aren't a business customer.

[whipartist.livejournal.com]

You were probably paying for "up to 1.5Mb/sec", with no guarantee of getting the full theoretical bandwidth. That's very common-- I'm currently paying for 6Mb/sec downstream, but the line tests out at only being capable of about 5.2Mb/sec.

As for the disconnects, yeah, you have a huge beef there.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Is there a fixed wireless broadband provider in your area? The one I use (in another state) offers up to 10 Mb/s. It's a bit more expensive than DSL but I've been very happy with it -- and they're not hostage to the phone company's lines for the last leg to your home.

[mholmesiv.livejournal.com]

Speak to the techs and get them to switch your line to "safe mode", which is 900K down or so, if that doesn't work, have them step down until the line is stable. you won't get huge speed, but you will get a stable line. I had exactly the same problem with my Covad line because of the sucky qwest line quality, so I complained and got them to step down to 640K/384K, which stabilised it for a while, then I had to go down to 384/384, now my line is rock solid. Admittedly I'm still paying the 1.5/384 amount, but there's not much choice about that, especially since Cable does not allow servers, and I have 3.