Been fighting CL for about 6 years with this horrible 1.5mb connection. For the last couple years I've been hammering them hard with support contacts trying to get them to fix the bandwidth issues for my area. They currently have the area marked as bandwidth exhausted and I'm about 4 miles from the main CL building for the area. Just 1/2 mile away from their building is max 10mb service, and that's available up to 1 mile from my house. My grandpa is about a 1/2 mile away, and I see some effect on his connection with the bandwidth issues too, speed tests bunce from 3-6mb upto 17mb which is what they just upgraded him to.
Anyway, I've always hated DSL, grew up with Cable and it worked really well. I've contacted every ISP possible for my area, the only option I can find is a wireless company if I pay to put up a tower (~$4000 or so), or pay the cable company I found to expand their network to my area. Their old quote was $3600 + install ($120), but there's a 2nd person interested next to me so that should reduce the costs. Sadly their fiber connection terminates a mile away and the expansion will be cable based. They say they can provide up to 30mb connection and once they upgrade their hardware they can provide up to 110mb. Figured hard wired is more reliable than wireless, best the wireless can do is 15mb and it's running around 15 miles for their fiber hook up. Anyway, the cable company is most likely hanging wire, since their existing lines from their main building are all hung to almost my road.
Just to be clear, I'm out in the country, about 20 miles from the nearest city (by road). My current DSL is phone line based, probably 50+ year old lines and they already did an upgrade in my area not too long ago that ended 1 mile short of my house, but from my understanding, fiber from their main building doesn't go too far, 1/2 mile or so (last terminal/box I can find that mentions burred fiber is at the fire department like 1/4 mile from the building).
To expand on my issues, started off as bandwidth related (lower than expected most of the time, got about 50-60% of the speed I'm paying for), for the last about year it has gotten so bad it seems to be dropping packets, but mainly related to DNS. Websites fail to resolve very often and keeps getting worse, but pinging sites via ip doesn't fail nearly as often. I've tired cloudflare's dns and google's with no change. I've hooked up directly at the pole's test port, same results with a different computer. Neighbors in my area confirm they have the same issues. CL Techs pretty much just laugh at the idea of the area being fixed. They've replaced the modem 4 times before I stated to tell them that I've replaced it more than enough times, it's not the modem.
Since outages give me a price break, I've been monitoring my connection via a quick program I made, here's the latest outages. Outage is defined as 3 ping fails in a row against 3 different servers with 5 sec timeout. Not sure what the norm is for outages, but it doesn't seem extremely bad. Also the ping rate is once per min, so the outage for 1 min might just be a modem reboot, ip refresh etc.
8/26/2019 1:12:15 AM Outage Start
8/26/2019 1:13:15 AM Outage End
8/27/2019 8:35:26 PM Outage Start
8/27/2019 8:36:26 PM Outage End
8/28/2019 7:52:16 PM Outage Start
8/28/2019 7:54:21 PM Outage End
9/10/2019 1:08:03 AM Outage Start
9/10/2019 3:48:39 AM Outage End
Quick little about me, I was a pc tech, database admin (mainly ended up programming), programmer (mainly as a hobby for 20 years), I've worked with networks enough to have a pretty good idea on how they function.
My setup:
Pole to house - cat5e cable new from CL
Modem: C1100Z (tech said it's the "good one")
I use my own netgear switch, but direct connect to the modem doesn't effect anything.
Single user, but I'm a power user... well really 1.5mb can't even support 1 user with today's internet standards.
All devices are had wired and connect at gb
Several techs have validated signal strength is great, and one did a test from the phone line the modem uses to the DSLAM and it tested at 21mb/s (~1300ft loop). All techs says it's the back bone, and I'd agree (this was before the bandwidth exhaust status).
If any other info is needed, let me know. I just want stable internet, atleast 10mb connection so I can watch streams and do my work online (ebay and such). I've thought about moving, but I like the location too much, country, good neighbors, state land near by, and I own enough land to ride atvs on and such, the internet service is the only negative about my area.
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