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I live rural and high speed Internet options are very limited. No cable and no DSL any time soon. So I started with satellite (WildBlue). It was ok all things considered. Download speed was about 1Mbps. But the biggest drawbacks were latency >700ms, bandwidth caps, and high price ($79.00 month). After a couple of years, I switched to a Sprint data card. Download speeds were about the same, latency was good and they had no caps (at first) and it was slightly cheaper at $59.00 month (but had a 2 year contract). Finally we got a WISP (last May). Download speeds were ok in the day (around 2Mbps), no limits, and it was only $30.00 a month with no contract. The only drawback was I had to pay about $400 for a 50' mast to put the antenna on, and the speeds slowed down a bit in the evenings. But overall it was the best deal.

So they finally did some upgrades over the weekend and speeds were great. I was getting nearly 6Mbps during prime time (about the limit of the system) :71-. All was good until a piece of equipment failed on their end. They replaced it, and speeds were ok for a couple of hours and then dropped to like 200K (and stayed there). After going around and around with them (I talked face to face with the head tech and we verified it was not my computers) I was told that since nobody else was having a problem I was SOL. And if I was not happy with the service I was free to cancel it.  :25-

Needless to say I am furious. There really is not much I can do since there is no contract. I guess they feel that it's not cost effective to have anyone spend any time on it for what they are charging, and they don't give a darn about customer service since there is no competition.  :60-

Looks like I may have to go back to Sprint (only carrier with coverage out here). :8-

I would see if you could find some of their other customers and check out their systems.
With 50ft masts they should be easy to spot.

Having invested in the mast and such it would be a shame to abandon it.
Is there any kind of signal diagnostics you can do ?

It's possible that they are running fine and your pc is fine but the receiver is misaligned or the active equipment and/or modem is shot.
Maybe you could beg some spares for diagnostic purposes.

"You will kneel down!"

                                - Elizabeth Taylor to Julius Caesar in Cleopatra

Not everyone is on the same access point on the tower. So it would be difficult to know who to ask.

The 'modem' is actually built into the radio at the top of the mast. All that comes down from it is a CAT5 cable that goes into my computer or router and has a power inserter connected to it.

Now I did think of something. Early on they had to turn it to point it at a different tower. That kinked/pinched the cable near the top, and the bottom part literally flaps in the breeze. All of that flapping in the breeze may have worn though or is causing other problems. That may be why they can talk to the radio fine, but I may be having a problem between the radio and my computer/router.

This picture was from before they turned it. Now it faces toward where I took the picture from.

Are you in "Hill Country"?  :103- 50 feet seems like a tall mast, when I had Sprint out here the antenna was another 4 feet off the roof of my single story place...

No, just pretty far out. The towers are located on things like grain silos so they are not very high to begin with. Since the WISP is line of sight, the higher the better. I originally had it on my old TV antenna which was 20' up, but that was not cutting it. Actually this on is only 45' because the installer made the guy wires too short. :25- I ended up having to re-do much of the work including adding tensioners, but I didn't mess with raising it any more since it worked fine.

Here is a picture of the cable at the top of the mast after they turned it.   :30-

ohh!....That was smart.... :25-

Since then I rotated the guy wires to relieve the stress. But I don't know what damage was already done. The section that concerns me more is the next segment down. This one has no tie strap on it and the wind (and we get a lot) makes the cable vibrate like a guitar string. It has been chaffing on the ring/wire for about 10 months.

Probably not the easiest thing to do considering the height but what
if there was a hole near the top of the pipe and a hole near the bottom -
couldn't you just drop the whole wire down inside and run it out the lower hole near the base?
I can't imagine that's a solid staff?

Oh, that would have actually made sense. The only issue I can see is needing some sort of grommets to protect the cable. The mast is telescoping, so it would have been easy to do it that way.

They originally just had the mast sitting on the ground. That of course caused it to start to sink into the ground. :25-  So I ended up fabricating this. I have the mast bolted to two 1/4" steel metal plates that are embedded in concrete. The PVC allows protection from damage and also allows me access to the brackets attached to the mast in case it ever needs to be turned again. I ended up spending about another $100  doing it right. None of the guy wire ground mounts were cemented. They just had the rods stuck in the ground.

Another picture of a fix I made. The rest of the guy wires just went to these crappy T-posts. I put them in concrete and also ran another wire to help brace the post. I also installed the turnbuckles to adjust tension. With the winds we get there, it would not still be standing if I had left it the way they did it.

Wait, what? :103-

Oh, I get it: You're in Texas, so they were drilling for oil with the mast. :200- :200- :96-

 :277-

So I stop at the ISP office again today, and really tried to remain cool and calm.  :58- That lasted for all of 2 minutes. Again I was told that there was nothing wrong with the system and then I got a lecture on 'the laws of physics'. This bonehead was trying to tell me that those laws just decided to change at 9:00pm on Tuesday after 10 months of being fine. :7- BTW, this time one of the owners was present (but has an equally bad attitude).

But I finally trapped him with his own words. He was claiming that it was 'atmospheric' or something else that was interfering with the signal. But then he said that the logs show that my radio has been working perfectly. I asked him how could it be working perfectly that be if there was interference? It was then that the owner finally admitted that there may be something going on, and he is going to look into it.

I'm not going to hold my breath though. :60-

 'atmospheric' LOL like what an aurora.....In know way am I a expert here and I find this thread interesting
but why would you run cat5 such a long distance there must be some kind of line loss going on here which such a long run
what do you have at the top of the tower is it a dish or some kind of quad antenna,funny that the installer
made the guy wires to short must have been a newbie or just quit working at radio shack.

Anyway good luck with this battle poppo and keep us posted.

Tim

I just thought of something this is wireless correct
what are the chances someone is leaching off you is it secured ?
Heck with it stop paying for it and spin the thing around and leach off someone else for free.....LOL

The radio is a self contained unit. It has the radio and 'WISP router' built in. So all you need is a CAT5 cable to your computer or your own router (connected to a power inserter first). I think the max cable length is 325 feet. I'm only using about 150 feet. I sort of ruled out the cable though. I ran a logging ping test and went out and shook the cable every which way and it never skipped a beat. The fact that the speeds come to a crawl mostly during prime time leads me to believe that they mis-configured something after replacing the failed unit on the tower.

Or they're oversubscribed on that tower...

No. Before this weekend the worse it ever got was maybe around 800Kbps during prime time.They did some system upgrades last weekend. That got the speeds back up even during prime time (>4Mbps). But then they had an equipment failure on the tower. After the equipment was replaced the speeds went up even more. I was getting 6Mps at 8:30pm! But then about 9:00pm on Tuesday things took a dump and have not been right ever since. Now I get ~200Kbps in the evenings. I never had that low of speeds even before the upgrades. Daytime is still above 3Mbps, but still not as stable as it was before they replaced the tower equipment.  

Personally, I think they miss-configured something after replacing the equipment that is causing some sort of bottleneck.

My speculation at this point is that given the posted picture of the twisted cable around your mast is that your wires are broken or loose.

In my cable TV and antenna experience...... they use coax cables - the coax core is solid.

This core can easily get broken as it is a single solid strand. Its broken when the cable is sharply bent.
Sometimes the break is not obvious becasue it happens inside the wire. Because antennas work on antenuation which is where the signal is carried between the sheild and the core when the core (or sheild) is broken the result is a loss of signal strength and not a toal loss of signal.

I really don't think so any more. This is very time dependent. It slows down during prime time and then gets better as it gets later and past midnight. And as I noted, I really fiddled with that cable and it never glitched. As we speak things are already down to 2Mbps and dropping.

BTW, they told me that they would replace the cable, but I would have to pay for it even though they are the ones who did that. Doh! :25-

I just re-read your posts - your not using an antenna. You noted it was self contained and your just running a CAT5.
I doubt that it is the cable now as well.

Are you able to change the channel on the wirless ? Could be your neighbors Microwave (or verizons or at&t's) that crosses your line of sight.

I have no contol over the radio.

Neighbors? What are those?  :72-

Also any other interfence would happen suddenly. This is a slow decline (other than the sudden drop on Tuesday) as more people get home and get on line. It almost has to be a bottleneck caused by something.

Ah HA! I see your problem. It's those crop circles from outer space between you and the tower!  :200- :127-  :30- :208- :208- :208-


Seriously, is it possible that they set up high traffic bandwidth throttling on their end without telling anyone? :103-

It may be throttling related, but I don't do any streaming or anything other than if someone posts a youtube video or something here. My usage is less than 300MB per day (and that is spread out over the whole day because I'm retired). But again, they may have something mis-configured. Unfortunately every time I try to suggest something like that to them, I get told I don't know what I'm talking about.  :60-

Here is an example. First from 3:00pm and second at 6:00pm. Uploads are capped at 1Mbps. In the past, the uploads stayed fine even when the downloads slowed. But this time it's affecting both.

The biggest thing they look at when people have problems is ping and jitter. If the jitter is high, it is a sign of a signal issue. Mine remain fine even during the slowdown and are actually excellent for a WISP. This was at 6:00pm after the speed took a dump.

I didn't mean that they necessarily set up selective throttling for those using a lot of bandwidth, which is the more common practice, but that they might have purposefully or accidentally set throttling on all accounts when the overall traffic level increases. That would seem to fit the behavior you describe.

As you suggest, it might have been a mistake they made when they configured the new equipment, or they might have done it purposefully and are making BS excuses when customers complain. I wouldn't put it past them if they are a mom and pop operation; they may be trying to penny pinch their overall bandwidth use to save money and increase profits.

They are pretty bad, but I doubt they would have done it on purpose. The announced that the upgrades would improve speeds and they would have everyone up in arms if it actually made things worse. And everything was fine after the upgrades until they replaced the failed equipment.

I'm hoping more people will notice and call. Unless it is just mine that is FUBAR. :8-

Must be modern terminology, I have never seen an "a" in FUBR !    Maybe it's just plain Ol   SNAFU

Actually old termonology. :89-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUBAR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUBAR)


Just about that time. :47-

This^^^

They set limits on all users when they oversubscribe a link, so that nobody loses service altogether. Instead, everyone gets a piece of the very small pie.  :60-

After all, they don't guarantee upload or download speed, so you can't complain if it slows down. If you lose service altogether, then you could complain and they'd have to compensate you for the outage.  :30- :30-

Fubar

No. Did you read the whole thread? They did system upgrades over the weekend specifically to give MORE bandwidth. And it was working great until they had a piece of equipment fail on the tower. After the link on the tower was replaced, THEN the speed problems started.

Yes, I read the whole thread.  :89-

Installing/upgrading equipment to increase speed doesn't preclude them from implementing throttling. They can either implement throttling across the board, use time-based restrictions, or just throttle the heavy users. As Stat already said, they could have either done it accidentally or on purpose, but there's nothing they could have misconfigured that would only cause slowdowns in high usage periods except for throttling.

I do have a very small bit of knowledge about the subject...

 :131- :131- :131- :259- 



SF :31-

No it doesn't. But they can't legally change the terms of the service without notice. And the notice they gave was the exact opposite - that they were increasing the BW to relieve the existing slowdowns (which were not that bad).

And if that was the plan, they would not have given everyone better speeds for a few days and then chopping it to 1/4 of what it was before the upgrades. That would make no sense and would open them up to a lawsuit.

I'm 99.999% sure they just have something screwed up. They have done it before.

Sure there is. A mis-configured managed switch or router can cause all sorts of bottlenecks when traffic gets heavy. And if they did implement throttling why not just tell me that is what they did? :103-  What could I do other than cancel the service, which I can do at any time since the contract is month to month?

But I'll ask them outright and see what they say.  

From their TOS


No such notice was given. If it was, I'm sure they would have reminded me of it when I complained.

Go read my post again...  :89-

I did but I'm  :103-

I know these folks are screwed up, but I can't imagine they would have intentionally done something like this. It just makes no sense. And as I already mentioned, even if they did implement throttling, they would/should have just said so. Instead, everything they said was totally contrary to that. Why blame it on 'atmospheric' conditions? Most of the people live close enough to the tower not to be able to get away with that excuse. And throttling everyone to 200Kbps is a bit extreme no matter how you look at it.

Oh, and when you call the tech support line, one of the things they have you do is run a speed test. Why would they have issued me a ticket number when I called about it if was 'normal'?

If this was a throttling issue either intentional or accidental, the response should have been:

We implemented throttling and if you don't like it cancel.

or

We implemented throttling and we will check to see if it needs to be tweaked.

Either would have been a lot simpler and faster then all of the back and forth communications that have been going on over this.

So here's the problem, Poppo.

From their TOS:

Subject to applicable law

That phrase is there to protect them, not you.

They don't need to notify you of ANY changes unless specifically required by law. And, they could implement throttling at any time and not be required to tell you in any state, county, or city because they don't GUARANTEE your service level. If they did guarantee your service level, then in certain locations (subject to applicable law) they would be required to tell you, and in other areas, not required (subject to applicable law). But the only accounts that come with guaranteed bandwidth are business accounts, and at $50/month, you're not on a business account.

The reason they wouldn't notify you of throttling is that customers don't like to be told that their service is being limited in any way. That's just the way we are, we want it all and we want it free (or as cheap as possible).  :96-

Comcast went through this a few years back, there was so much P2P file sharing occurring on their network that their customers were experiencing massive slowdowns during peak hours and Comcast took steps to reduce this. Their first implementation was to throttle BitTorrent traffic, but their customers complained so they stopped that method and throttled the heavy users instead. The FCC ruled against their throttling of BitTorrent users, but that decision was overturned in appeals court, the court told the FCC that it was Comcast's network, and they could throttle traffic as they see fit to supply acceptable service to their customers. The complaint that Comcast was legally required to disclose the throttling was thrown out as well, since their SLA did not guarantee bandwidth.
More information on that subject can be found heer:
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/88573/comcast-prevails-in-bittorrent-throttling-case/ (http://www.zeropaid.com/news/88573/comcast-prevails-in-bittorrent-throttling-case/)


A misconfigured switch or router would set off alarms throughout your ISP's system, all their tech guys would know about it within minutes of it occurring. A managed device is exactly that: Managed. It's not like they throw some device up on a tower without using SNMP to monitor the device and send informational status messages as well as varying levels of alerts and alarms about issues in real-time, that would be an unmanaged device. Those messages are dealt with on the server side according to the level of importance of the message (which is user-configurable, usually on the device side), anywhere from discarding it, to logging it, to sending emails or pages to their whole staff the moment a problem is detected if it's serious enough.

<edit>

Just thought of a good analogy:

SNMP is the network world's version of player tracking systems. Just like ACRES or Mastercom or any of the other systems out there sends notifocation of issues and status of slot machines out on the floor to casino personnel, SNMP performs the same function. But instead of having many disparate systems to accomplish the same goal, SNMP has become the de facto standard in the networking world. There's not a single networking equipment manufacturer in the world that doesn't offer SNMP on their managed devices. Some may implement different proprietary protocols in addition, but none of them would be given a second glance if they didn't support SNMP.

Well, I'm still not buying it. These folks have had things screwed up for several days/weeks in the past, before they could figure out what was wrong. While I understand where you are coming from, it just doesn't make sense that they would not just tell me that is what they were doing and just tell me to pack sand. I've been a thorn in their side since the beginning due to the problems they were having then (first to do the intial install, then having to move that to the mast, then having to re-point to another tower due to issues on the first tower). I would think they would have jumped on the opportunity to get rid of me instead of making things up.

But, IF that is what they did, then they may be in for a big backlash once more people start to notice. It was only a couple of hours before I noticed and I was on them (especially after several days of great speeds).  And I'm by no means a heavy user. Throttling should not affect simple web browsing. I get pages that won't load without refreshing or that take as long as dial-up when things are at it's slowest.  

If nothing else, maybe they will re-think their stratagy. Word travels fast around here.

I sent the owner an e-mail and outright asked him if this was a throttling issue. So we shall see what he says.

You can do a couple of things to test if the throttling is in place.


Typically if throtlling was in place it could be at a couple of places.
THe first thing to understand is that you are dealing with a company that is making its money by servicing rual customers and not one of the major telcos.
The company you are dealing with is most likely buying bandwidth from a major company known as a Tier1 ISP, Tier1 companies connect directly to the internet.

You--))        ((----Receiver ---------active ISP equipment ---- Router/firewall ----Link to Internet---------Tier1 ISP ----------- Router/Firewall ------ Internet ---- Google (8.8.8.8)

The throttling would potentially be occuring between your ISP and their link to the Internet. In which case this would happen at their router or firewall.
Or if your ISP is drawing too much bandwidth as sometimes happens then the throtelling will happen at the gateway of the Tier 1 company.

The first thing to do is establish a baseline to the outside world. I usually use google.
Issue the command ping -l15000 -w1000 8.8.8.8

This will send a lot of data to google and request a response. The default is 32bytes so 5000 is a beefier payload. If you don't put the w command (wait) then it will time out before it can respond.

If you then ping the ISP equipment closest to you the time should be somewhat improved. If it is improved over the long distance test then there "could be" throttling otherwise if the pings are about the same then its likely a radio problem. As your radio would be the slowest link.

If you think its the radio I will go back to my earlier recommendation and see if you can beg some spares to see if a different radio improves things. You only need to change it once. Its either going to improve dramatically or its going to be the same.

for the heck of it - I tried it but got an error in the [-15000] entry.
What did I do wrong?
Should I have entered [-1500] instead?
Click on screenshot to enlarge if needed>>>

jay,

Earlier I posted the pingtest.net test results which I thought tested for that. It has remained consistent even during the slowest times. Pings to my gateway (the tower) are typically 7-12ms and always have been in that range unless they start having equipment problems.

They already said the radio checks out fine (and showed me the logs). No way would they let me 'borrow' another radio anyway.

Just to play Devil's Advocate here, the longer they avoid fessing up, the longer you're paying for the service, and if they're truly the only game in town (or as long as their service is more than marginally better than the competition), their customers (which includes you) are pretty much a captive audience. >:D  Comcast was the same way with television programming until Dish Network and DirecTV became players in the same market.

I feel your pain here because I live in an older section of town, and high speed DSL was never an option until about 6 years ago so I was at the mercy of whatever ISP could give me service. I had Sprint Wireless for a while (same deployment as yours, an antenna and modem atop a mast on the roof, and a router under my desk), and they used to test my connection's speed to their internal server, so of course the speed was great and they never admitted there was an issue. Where they were throttling us customers was at their peering point with the Internet, because the more data they passed, the more it cost them. I'd get over a megabit to their internal server, but only 128k if I was lucky out to the internet. Finally, AT&T dropped a multiline repeater a few blocks from my house and I get 6 meg down now. :89- I tried Comcast, but their cable plant is so old here it can't support any higher bitrate than I get with DSL, and it's shared media as well so other people's usage affects me. On top of that, they can't give me static IP addresses, so AT&T DSL gets my business until something better comes along. :186-

oh I figured it out...
I had to add the wait [ w ]  before the "15000"..
here's some results from the North Country....lol
Click to enlarge screenshot if needed...>>>

LOL. My times are better than yours. (but wrong data size command)

Hmmm..... it comes back at 45ms with a data size of 1000, but times out with 1500 (even with a high -w). :103-

lol

Yeah...and I'm supposed to be on "hi-speed DSL"   yeah right.... :72-  :276-

I pay way too much  :56- :148- for this crap up here... :96-

Mark,

Jay is probably in bed, but I think that you missed a letter in there possibly: "-l15000" maybe that was supposed to be a lower case "L", you know "l"??? :103-

Just a thought.... I tried an "l" and it did something without erroring...

CH :95-

ADD: Just noticed on the next page that you did it with a -w, and I think it is supposed to be -l (l for length) like I mentioned above. :186-

Mark,
that is -L 5000 but the L has to be lower case and no space between the L and the 5000 so
-l5000 which makes it look like 15000

Interesting enough 1500 however is the MTU size of Microsofts ethernet interface and the maximum size of 1 ethernet packet is 1514.

Well guys, I hate to say it, but you may be right about the throttling. I know these folks are low lifes (i.e. wanting me to pay for replacing a cable they screwed up), but I really didn't think they would go to such extremes of blatant lying on such a wide scale.

What caused me to possibly change my mind was after looking over their site, I found a new 'service'. All of their packages always stated the all to common 'up to' xMp speeds. But now you get to pay more to get what you are already paying for. :60-


So it looks like you get to pay more not to be throttled (as much).  :47- Any of the higher packages should streem or download just fine if you were getting the advertised 'up to' speeds.e
I'll still wait to see what replies I get to all of the screen shots I was asked to send, and my direct question about the throttling. I'm expecting I either won't get a reply because they know they have been caught, or maybe things will mysteriously fix themselves (they unthrottle me). That's how I originally got the higher tiered plan for the cost of the lower one (by catching them lying about things during my pre-sale questioning).

I suppose the main reason I was not believing it was throttling was because of the extreme amount of it. As I noted, properly implemented throttling should not negatively affect general web browsing if you are not doing anything else.

And I've seen their 'headquarters'. I really don't think they have a lot of sophisticated monitoring. From past experience it seems that they only respond to problems after enough people call in to complain. I'm sure they monitor for total outages, but I'm not sure they monitor for bottleneck issues on a single access point.

Hmmm.... it's been a while since I used ping options. But on my XP machine it doesn't work unless you leave a space between the -l and number.
Ping -l500 does not work. Ping -l 500 does (and correctly shows a size of 500 bytes)

I cannot send 5000 bytes to Google without it timing out (note the 10 second delay and the maxed out TTL.) I can't even send 2000. However, I can send 5000 to NLG and get a response. I basically have DSL speed (about 768kb-1Mb download speed) :47- :58-

<ADD> You can send 5k bytes to NLG and compare your response times to mine, if that would help. The larger packet size will magnify small delay differences and should be more useful.

You might also try running some tracerts to see if there are timeout problems and if so, where they are located.

This difference is probably between an upgraded version of WinXP and a fresh installation, the upgrade doesn't change some components. My personal peeve is the command prompt, with the older version you simply click and drag the cursor to highlight text so you can copy it, with the new version you have to right-click and select "Mark" before you can highlight the text. :37- Why the he!! did they add an extra step? :37-

Yes, that sucks, but for keyboard oriented folks like me, it's much faster to hit  <Alt><Space> , E  , <Enter> .  Then highlight the text (it highlights in the old block format, not as lines of text, via the standard method of using the cursor keys in combination with the <ctrl>, <Shift>, <Home>, <End>, <PgUp>, and <PgDn> keys.) and press <Enter> once more to copy the data to the clipboard.

To paste text from the clipboard, press <Alt><Space> , E , P


Both of these are much faster than using the mouse, once you get used to it, since you should be typing on the keyboard with both hands and not holding the mouse at all when in a command window. :47- :200-   Of course, for those one-fingered typists who never take their other hand off of the mouse, use the right click menu. :30-


Stat :31-

What? :103- They're actually blocking ping floods somewhere on your ISP's network? How dare they!  :55-
 :72- :72- :72-

This is a holdover from days gone by, when oversize ping packets were used maliciously to hammer older devices by forcing them to fragment and reassemble the packets. There's a fair bit of overhead involved in calculating/writing the fragment offset header on the TX side and reassembling on the RX side, and there was the old Ping of Death" bug that would overflow the RX buffer of older OSes by sending a packet larger than 65535 bits, which is the maximum IPv4 packet size. Malicious ping floods can still use large data payloads to DoS slower computers/broadband connections, as even though it's only a ping request the receiving side must process the whole request (including all the data contained within) before it can respond to the request. With the processing power of modern computers this isn't an issue any more, the computers we have barely bump the processor even when processing traffic at the highest broadband speeds available.

The max Ethernet frame size that Jay referred to above (1514) is correct, usually the MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) used by operating systems is 1500 bytes. This allows room for the IP headers to be added without forcing fragmentation of the packets. In some cases (sending traffic over a VPN for example), it is necessary to lower the MTU to allow for the extra headers added as a function of encrypting the traffic.  :186-

It depends on how you're working. If you're inside a file, your method might be faster depending on where the cursor is and where it needs to be.You still need to use the mouse to get the cursor to your starting point if it's not on your current line when at the DOS prompt in a command window, and I can do that faster with the mouse. I've had several developers at work lose this challenge to me, it's always good to get a free Thai lunch now and then. Mmmmm, Thai... :160-

For editing text files, I use vi. :186- None of these crappy Winblows finger contortionist key combinations for me.   :96- I wouldn't use Windows at all except some of our products and UI interfaces require it. Damn you, Bill Gates! :37-

Actually, you don't, but you're right that it depends on program you're in and your location in the text as to which is faster.


I admit that I tend to use the <ctrl><shift> E,P  to paste paths and domain names into the DOS window more often than I use the mark function to copy text out of it.

In my case, I'm usually copying text out to show developers how bad their code really is...  :186- :96- :97-

Just coming back to topic, why not spend the $10 for the speed boost. Then you will know for sure. SInce there is no contract you should be able to cancel it next month if it doesn't change things.

$10 is much cheaper than high blood pressure pills.

Update:

Surprisingly I got a VM (I was in the shower) and they had me change my IP address do to a 'possible conflict' with someone else on the network. Now, I had actually asked them that once before when I was having some dropout issues on the old tower and they 'assured' me it was not possible. Well, anything is possible, but you would think their system would alert them to IP conflicts.

What I suspect (since they did not answer the question about throttling), is that maybe they moved me to a block of addresses that are not throttled. I'll find out this evening if the 'fiix' worked, regardless of what it was.

Well, the IP change didn't fix anything.  :60-  I still think they have something screwed up. When things slow down, I am seeing ping times to the gateway (on the tower) go up. Generally that is an indication of a misaligned antenna. But it ONLY happens during prime time and it's not constant. Normal pings are 5ms-11ms all night and all day. But now they will fluctuate from 9ms to 80ms during peak hours. It never used to do that even when it was slow in the evenings. Maybe it is throttling, but it just seems like the link can't handle the load or the traffic is not being prioritized right.

Maybe "Mom" and "Pop" need to hire a professional and find another job for "Junior". lolol  :279-    :72-  :72-  :72-

Totally down now. Tech support lines are 'all circuits are busy'. I am doing this on my iPad.

In a slight twist of events, after the system came back up last night, speeds were excellent for about a half hour (this was during the normal slowdown period). But then they started to slow to a crawl again (I'm assuming as more people got back on line). So that pretty much blows their 'atmospheric' theory out of the water. I sent yet another e-mail explaining what had happened and how a 'traffic issue' could really be the only explanation. I actually got a reply this time stating that they are working on the speed issue (must be others complaining too) and they are going to add 2 more access points on the tower in the 'very near future'.

So I'll wait a couple of weeks and see what happens.