[lug] Comcast users (OT)

[D. Stimits]

Jeff wrote:

> Any Comcast users out there?  Have any of you notice a significant
> degradation in speed that last few days?  I'm still using the AT&T part
> of the network.  I haven't been migrated yet...
>
> Thanks,
> Jeff
>
There has been a long-term failure in the Longmont area (I'm under 
attbi.com so far, it will become comcast.net in a couple of days). These 
failures occur only at night, and it starts by losing the ability to 
renew a DHCP lease. Dotted decimal addresses work for a while (DNS dies 
too), but soon degrade to up to 85% packet loss. This self-repairs late 
at night also, sometimes within a minute of the failure, sometimes not 
for an hour or so. I have talked to the tech people almost every night 
now for two months, and had a tech out at the house. Result was that 
lines and equipment here are good. Last night they found that one 
gateway was saying the cable modem was online, yet the gateway had an 
80% packet loss on one test board, and showed as good on another. Just a 
few minutes before this, it had failed and self-fixed itself, and the 
tech at that time said the line quality was as good as they could 
get...yet less than an hour later, it did it again.

The tech that came to the house said no overt failures had been noticed, 
but a series of people in the Longmont area that were gamers were 
complaining about sudden latency increases and quality loss (this was 
only at night, and coincidentally, only during maintenance cycles). But 
because all of these reports happen at night when techs are not 
available, and because techs work on it the next day, the problem is not 
visible to them. This has gone on over two months now, and at least one 
idiot said it had to be my hardware (despite the tech coming out and 
telling me it is 100% good here).

Were your degradations in speed at evening/night?

D. Stimits, stimits AT attbi DOT com
(about to become a comcast DOT net)