This morning my network access was sucking rocks. Pinging upstream showed up to 80% packet loss. Resetting the router and the cable modem didn’t help. I called RoadRunner, and they had a recorded message saying that they were doing work and service might be intermittent until 8:00am. So I waited.
At 7:30, it was still just as bad, so I called again. This time, no recording, so I talked to somebody. He had me do all the same old crap, and connect my laptop directly to the modem so the router wasn’t a factor. I jumped through their hoops, and he agreed that I had a problem. So he said they’d send somebody out today. But he said they’d call my cell phone before they came out, so that I wouldn’t be stuck at home.
Now, I’ve experienced RoadRunner service promises before, so I wasn’t fooled. I arranged to work from home. But I had to go out for stuff for lunch. I was only gone for about three songs on my iPod, so of course, when I came home I found a RoadRunner truck parked in my driveway, blocking my way in. I didn’t see the guy, so I ran around the back and he wasn’t there. I went back out front and saw he was in the truck – I don’t know how I missed him before.
He came in and connected his signal strength measuring device, and verfied a strong cable signal. Then he asked to see where the cable came in. Now this is the strange thing – a few days ago the cable had flopped down out of the basement rafters, and I’d just shoved it back up. But I wonder if that was a sign of something – or maybe it was just the hot weather? Anyway, he made me reset the modem again, and as usual it took a good couple of minutes to reconnect. But he got impatient and said “I’ll get you a new modem”.
RoadRunner has wanted to switch me to a different modem for years now. I got my modem in the RoadRunner beta test, and back then the downlink speed was 10 megabits per second. When they went to “production”, they used a cheaper modem that had a maximum downlink speed of 2 megabits per second. They claimed that the DOCSIS modems had remote configuration options that would give them more ability to diagnose problems. But for a few years, those of us with the “old” modems had a decided speed advantage over the others – we’d easily get 600K/s downloading from FTP sites while the suckers with the new modems got less than 180K/s. But then they put all the old modems on a different subnet with a router that somehow slowed us down to the same level.
RoadRunner is now selling an upgrade where you can pay extra and get 3 megabits per second, so I suppose the DOCSIS modems do have some of the capabilities they claim are so worthwhile.
Anyway, long story short (HAH) they swapped the modems, I came back alive (but with a different IP, so some people will be having problems reaching me until the DNS caches update). No packet loss according to ping and traceroute, and DSLreports.com shows me with a 2.4 megabits per second downlink, so I guess things are pretty much as before.
Now to find out how much that 3 megabits per second upgrade costs.