dsl madness
according to one of the regional vps for qwest i contacted earlier this year regarding their fttn (fiber to the node) deployment, they weren’t planning on having it available at my address til next year. imagine my surprise, when i got a postcard from qwest saying that they would be deploying it by year’s end, and then further my surprise when i saw it was available as an upgrade when i went online to pay my bill. i ordered 12/5 service for $52.99/month and was overnighted a vdsl modem to replace the adsl2 modem they’d sent me originally.
i received the new modem and installed it in preparation of the new circuit going online sometime before 1700 that day. unfortunately, qwest’s ordering system didn’t finish processing the order and it necessitated a call to customer service to get it completed so their engineers could finish provisioning. after that was settled, the line was up on the new vdsl circuit…but…the modem only trained at 6.5 mbit/sec. this was obviously disappointing, as my previous adsl circuit trained at a full 7192kbit/sec without issue. i contacted qwest support and they noticed there was a problem with errors incrementing at an insane rate. their engineers were pretty confident it was an external line fault, so they issued a repair ticket.
the qwest tech tested the lines between the premises to the termination point in their CO or RT, and it was pushing 12.1mbit all the way, when he tested at the jack in my office, however, it was only showing the same speed the modem had shown, indicating it was an interior wiring fault. he suggested finding the splices and wiring the jack directly to the plant coming in from the telco.
i managed to find our wiring and it turns out the contractor who built the complex didn’t follow best-practices for telephone wiring and used telecom beanies to splice together a total of 6 wires.
beanies are designed to handle a maximum of 3 wires each, so there was obviously an issue with this. after i identified the pair coming in from the office walljack, i directly connected the plant wiring to the jack, as the qwest tech suggested. when i fired the modem back up, it trained at 12122/888. it’s not the 12192/5192 that i was supposed to get, so i contacted qwest and it turns out they can’t provision my circuit for the 5mbit upload speed yet.
suffice it to say, i’m happy with the 1.4MB/sec sustained downstream and sort of happy with the stable 600kbit/sec rate-limited (qos) upstream. the line is nice and stable and after a couple weeks, i’m going to investigate whether qwest could remove interleaving from the line, so i could get sub-10ms first hop ping times like i had with the adsl2 circuit.
damn it, comcast
comcast is enhancing services in abq..which is great, because that means better speed or whatever the hell it is that they’re changing. unfortunately, it also means that while they’re swapping stuff out, they have less capacity which means hideous congestion during “peak hours” (i.e. when kids get home from school to when their parents go to bed) unfortunately for me, this means that 1. i can only play PC or PS3 games between the hours of 0100 and like 1500, and most of that time i spend sleeping. and 2. when i’m off from work, my typical game-playing times don’t work out because there’s so much loss/latency on my line that it’s impossible to play.
so, unless i get my game playing in early in the day, (which isn’t ideal because other than phil, the other people i play with aren’t around til the evening.)
what i’ve decided to do is give qwest a shot and see if maybe i can cope with a lack of speed (7 mbit or less vs 8 mbit) if it means my line is more stable and less prone to congestion issues. i’ve never had qwest service. previously, i had earthlink dsl (’01) covad dsl (03) and speakeasy dsl (03-07) and all were furnished by the clec (covad in all three cases) and latency sucked but reliability was relatively good. hopefully, cutting out the middle-man and going straight with the ILEC will make my life easier. i guess i’ll find out on 4/1/09 when the circuit is scheduled to be activated.
i’ve already been kind of disappointed with the ordering process, as qwest doesn’t offer a way to check order status easily like the other 3 providers i’ve used. whereas all 3 clecs give detailed status including provisioning, hand-offs for stuff, installation @ the co, etc. qwest told me to register on their my account site which isn’t available to me until the install date. i had to speak to three separate reps before i was even able to confirm that they had my order in the system and that it was being processed. so..that kind of sucks. the last rep i spoke to suggested that i call them or use their online chat system tomorrow or monday to get the tracking number for the modem.
SOCIAL MEDIA EXPLOOOOSION
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