Our DSL has become extremely flaky, and but Centurylink refuses to do anything or to try to help locate the problem. Yes, we are in "permanent exhaust" and have been now for about five years. Yes, there is too much bandwidth and not enough backhaul. No, they're not going to do anything about it.
However I am seeing additional weirdness which suggests to me that we probably have flaky network equipment, including possibly T-spans going up and down and losing backhaul capacity at times. It is quite possible water is getting into the T-span amplifier cases or the trunk lines when it is very high humidity.
[att=1]
The last two nights it has been very foggy overnight, and very oddly, everything works fine on the DSL for me right up until about 1am or so when suddenly I keep losing my connection to my Minecraft server and I cannot even do CenturyLink's own speed test without it failing over and over.
Then meanwhile in the morning when the sun comes up and the fog disappears and it is bright and warm, oh look the DSL works again at about 9-10am. On a Saturday, which should be "peak" time if this really is a bandwidth problem and not an equipment problem.
Even more odd is that it seems the download side is NOT the problem. I don't have any upload capacity. I'm supposed to be getting 0.25 megabit / 256 kilobit, except I'm getting more like 5 kilobit upload or less at times when the line is unstable.
[att=2]
After digging deeper into this, I am noting some additional strangeness where when the Internet seems to crap out on me, I can still ping remote numeric addresses. I cannot open any web pages, but I can still ping. How does this work?
I started opening additional command prompts in windows and opening more and more ping sessions, and meanwhile watching the Task Manager Networking tab to see what's happening. Okay, so I cannot open any web pages and everything else is failing. BUT I can ping the ever living shit out of my work router (93 megabit) on the statewide educational network (20 gigabit), with several hundred open command prompts all pinging it simultaneously. I pushed the connection up to a solid 256 kilobit out, 256 kilobit in with 20 byte ping packets, while at the same time nothing else works.
It seems like CL plant technicians may be doing some kind of traffic shaping, or perhaps there's some emergency mode to allow communication to the pedestal over flaky lines but limit everyday customer traffic.
So I started trying different size ping packets. And oddly it seems that I can ping with up to a 512 byte packet and it works fine, but go to 600 bytes and it fails. What the hell.
So next I've started playing around with MTU size......
[att=3]
SET MTU TO 256, right-click shortcut, run as administrator:
%comspec% /c netsh.exe interface ipv4 set subinterface "Local Area Connection" mtu=256 store=persistent & pause
....and oddly it seems that when the DSL flakes out on me, very small MTUs are much more reliable than the default of 1500 on Windows. But even so I still get frequent disconnects even with the small MTU window, just less of them with the default MTU of 1500.
[att=4]
Meanwhile, trying to get CL to acknowledge there's any sort of problem is turning out to be basically impossible. I tried calling this morning at 2 am when the DSL again stopped working, and got another Mexican reading a script at me "you are in permanent exhaust, you may experience poor performance at peak times." And you're telling me that the DSL suddenly stopping working at 2 AM is a peak time?? ".... you are in permanent exhaust and may experience poor performance on nights and weekends...."
BULL SHIT. There is something wrong with their equipment and they are refusing to fix it.
I have another tech scheduled to come out tomorrow. They will arrive when it is warm and sunny and it all works again and I expect I will again hear "WTF are you complaining about it works fine".
--
CenturyLink remote pedestal: RUBY, 10 miles west of Gilman, WI
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20533172-Rural-Century-Telephone-remote-terminal-unit
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20530745-Name-of-this-polemount-outdoor-telco-canister
↧