So what are the chances my net is fixed now?

Magus`

So I've been having internet troubles for a few months now (starting late last year or so). Mainly when it gets fairly late at night my latency in various things goes straight to hell. WoW is an easy way to see this as my latency goes from 50ms to 200ms in world and spikes to over 1000ms in instances.

In the course of the months I've had the following done:

Wires replaced inside and outside the house, new wall mount, new modem, and most recently fixing the 'head' of a cable where the rubber insulation was apparently missing and using a splitter to lower the dB strength from +13 to +6 (apparently +13 is high?).

Now it'll be a few hours yet before the LAGGY TIMES usually set in and I'm wondering if those last two things sound like things that would fix this? I'm getting pretty tired of this after several months and I feel bad for having techs come out to just poke at wires and go "LOOKS GOOD ON THIS END!".

Adus

I'm confused. You want us to guess whether or not your issues are fixed when you'll find out in a few hours either way?

Nathrak

If the lag is just during certain times and is predictable I'm afraid none of those things are likely to help. What type of internet is it? It sounds like it's a congestion thing from high internet usage times.

My ATT DSL in California has been going way down in speed during primetime for about this amount of time, to ~1mbs instead of 2.5 but my pings remain fine. And it's basically because of congestion back in the ATT network which they are not very motivated to fix. But hey it's an excuse to roll out caps and fees that will not help the problem at all.

Magus`

It's Cable. I talked to someone on the phone and they noted that my internet 'goes out' every night at 8, according to my modem log.

She also said I'm over my download cap, which I didn't even know I /had/. Now I'll have to find out how much WoW takes.

Esh

Magus` wrote: »

It's Cable. I talked to someone on the phone and they noted that my internet 'goes out' every night at 8, according to my modem log.

She also said I'm over my download cap, which I didn't even know I /had/. Now I'll have to find out how much WoW takes.

It barely takes any. Are you torrenting or streaming a lot of movies?

Magus`

A fair amount of TV shows on Netflix. I guess those are at least a gig or something.

SIGH.

Nathrak

If it's Netflix on computer with the Silverlight player you can ctrl-alt-shift-s to manually choose the bitrate, I think it defaults to the highest your net can handle. If you don't mind a little lower quality to save towards cap or such.

Magus`

I'm having a hell of a time finding out how much bandwidth I've used. Charter does not seem to have any sort of online measurement tool.

Esh

Magus` wrote: »

I'm having a hell of a time finding out how much bandwidth I've used. Charter does not seem to have any sort of online measurement tool.

What's the cap? Mine is 250gigs with Comcast and I never even come close to hitting it.

Magus`

100 GBs.

Magus`

Also is it possible to change the bandwidth used on the Wii? (That's where I do most of my Netflix-ing)

pacbowl

I had Charter for 4 years up until a few months ago and noticed the exact same problem. I could stay connected to WoW all day with no problems until evening rolled around, then like clockwork starting at about 9-10pm I would get disconnected every hour or so. Even doing randoms I would have to warn my party in advance that I would probably get discoed at least once. I could log back in immediately but it was still annoying as hell. I don't think the problem is on your end.

Magus`

Yeah, that's what I've been telling people, but Charter never seems to find anything.

A 'Line Tech' is coming tomorrow.

Also, what state are you in and what server?

riz

Is it just WoW that's getting high latency, or other programs too? Various ISPs had issues after 4.0 because Blizzard in their infinite wisdom changed something about WoW's packets/traffic that caused many ISPs' systems to categorize WoW as peer-to-peer traffic and set it to a lower priority than other traffic. So people would be okay midafternoon, but then around prime-time when everyone in the neighborhood was using their internet and causing that P2P throttling to kick in, WoW was getting fucked.

Time Warner had this problem, which I got around for a few months by using a third-party tunneling service, which apparently made the packets look different enough to TWC so it was treated as normal traffic. Dumb.

Magus`

It's most obvious in WoW, but various other things will perform notably worse. Speed/ping tests take a giant crap.

In the day I'll get 30-50ms pings with 1-2ms 'jitters' and after night time I'll get 70-80ms pings with 50-60ms 'jitters'.

Also according to the latest person to look at my account I am 'disconnecting' ever night at exactly 8 PM.

Nathrak

When you're over the cap Charter limits your speed during prime time so it might be that kicking in at 8.

pacbowl

I had Charter from 08 to early 11 in the Burbank, CA area and the speed was great. I did have the random area outage through the years but that's to be expected, however for the last year or so the connection would cut out past 9pm every hour or so for a few seconds, most of the time just enough to time-out an online game or remote desktop session. I never had a problem with speed or latency, just the random disconnects and when they upgraded to DOCSIS 3.0 they gave me a new modem and that didn't even fix it. It only happened from around 9 or 10pm to early am. I used to VNC into my home pc from work 8am to 6pm every day and hardly had any disconnects come 9pm. Torrents and other resuming programs worked fine, but it was annoying to play late night games.

Magus`

Reading all this makes me wonder if it'll ever be fixed.

It's annoying to have Charter act like I'm crazy or something.

Magus`

The wire tech checked some things and told me apparently a 'ton' of people have been calling in. Apparently the fiber line we use via St. Louis isn't enough or whatnot and they're in the process of 'upgrading' it. Neat?

Kate of Lokys

Oh, man, you're near St. Louis? Yeah, Charter around here is fucked. We used it for the first year and a half we lived here, and it was consistently awful. Our issue was random disconnects, just like pacbowl described: the cable would cut out for maybe fifteen seconds, just long enough to disconnect us from whatever we were doing (and we were both in WoW raiding guilds at the time, so let me tell you how fun that was), then it would come right back on without us doing anything.

We went through the exact same shit you did. In our case, it took a few months before they would even admit there was a problem - the phone tech support kept saying it must be our router, even when we explained that the problem kept happening even when we had a single computer jacked directly into the cable modem. At one point, when we finally browbeat them into booking an appointment for a tech to come out, they actually accused us of deliberately wasting their time, and informed us that "when the tech gets out there and doesn't find anything wrong, we're going to have to charge you $30, are you sure you want us to do that?"

After that, we turned to the internet, and posted some highly unflattering (but completely true) things about Charter's service on Twitter. That got the attention of one of their higher-level tech guys, whose job is apparently to monitor social networking services for any complaints. The good news is, he was fast and professional and eager to help. The bad news is, nothing he did made a single bit of difference. Over the course of six months, we went through three different cable modems, we had every piece of wire from the cable box on the utility pole outside to the jack on the wall inspected and then replaced, we had four separate tech visits, but nothing they did actually helped the problem. The tech guy we were working with was as frustrated as we were: he could see that there was some kind of issue, he could see the disconnects happening, but he couldn't figure out what was causing them.

About two months ago we switched to AT&T UVerse DSL. Since then, we've had a grand total of two minutes of downtime, and that was during a brief power outage. It's a bit more expensive than Charter - we're currently paying about $95 per month for 25 MB DSL and basic cable television, compared to the $80 we were paying for 20 MB cable with Charter - but it is just worlds better. We have a lot more usable speed, too: with Charter, our effective connection speed dropped to about 5 MB on evenings and weekends, but with AT&T, we're pulling down a constant 20-22 MB all the time.

If UVerse is available in your neck of the woods, I highly recommend it. Charter is a clusterfuck, and I have no faith whatsoever in their ability to deal with whatever chronic flaws are plaguing their infrastructure at this point.

Magus`

Yeah, running the speed test that Charter themselves provided I noticed I go from 15-16 Mbps during the day to EXACTLY 2.5 Mbps after 8 PM. The person I talked to earlier claims he sees no evidence of me going over my download cap (100GB, yuck) and thus I don't see why I would be throttled.

Of course, one phone person said it was fairly likely I've gone over my cap while another claimed there was no way unless I was "Hitting Pirate Bay pretty hard".

As for the cost, it'd be hard to beat what I have now which is like 35/month for 12/1 service (no TV, but meh). I can only hope that this drop to 2.5 speeds is due to them overtaxing their own line and not throttling purposely on my end.