[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Michael O'Donnell) writes:
>
>
>
>>You're seeing this too? I was beginning to wonder if it was
>>just my house (just built recently, could have been any number
>>of problems). I'm over by 114 & 101...this seems to happen
>>to me once a week, although it could have been more recently.
>
>
>I love my cable modem when it works, but the periods
>of intermittently crappy throughput seem to be coming more
>and more frequently; I suspect everybody's seeing them.
>Everybody, that is, except the Customer Disservice people,
>who (in my experience) all too often know nothing about any
>troubles; "No sir, you're the only one who's complained..."
>
My LanCity modem died back in September. After quite a bit of
fighting [days] I got them to come out and look at it.
I got a replacement modem, one of the Toshibas [Model XXX1100 (I
don't remember what goes in the XXX)]. I had an intermittant
problem ever since I got that new modem.
I finally set aside a few hours on monday night to call them about
it. I had been able to determine exactly what the problem was, and
I knew it was going to be impossible to get it through their heads.
The problem was pretty simple, intermittantly the Toshiba was dropping
IP datagrams on the sending side. I finally determined this when I set
it up to do a repetitive ping to my default gateway. When the requests
were timing out, I knew they were getting to the cable modem because
the data light would flash every time the ping went.
After about 1/2 hour on the phone, I convinced him to transfer me over
to a specialist. That specialist kept trying to tell me that it was a
problem with my system, and kept trying to diagnose it. He was just
about to transfer me over to their network group when he wanted to check
a couple of other things. As soon as he figured out that I had an
internal network as well as the cable modem, he started to pull this
unsupported crap, and that he can't help me with any problem if there
are two cards in the machine.
So I got his boss on the phone, who was helpful and transferred me over
to the network group.
After talking to that guy for ever [he kept insisting that because I
didn't have 70% free resources, that was the problem], I finally
convinced him it was a problem with the cable modem, and he thought I
should have a tech come visit. This was 1 hour and 51 minutes in.
Story ain't over yet.
He apologizes, but I need more calls logged to get service. I told him
that I would be perfectly happy to log a call every time the packets
get dropped... and that I had observed over 20 occurances of 3-10 second
periods where it dropped over the last 2 hours on the phone. I told him
that I would be happy to log 40 calls by the end of the night if he could
figure out a way for me to log them in less than 2 hours each.
I got to talk to his boss... who was pleasant and hooked me up with a
tech appointment for the next day. 2 1/2 hours after I called.
One aside on this whole thing I discribed the problem and how it was
affecting my telnet connections, in that the client would drop my
connection after re-trying to send my data so many times. Because my
server didn't know the connection got dropped, it just assumed I hadn't
typed anything, and didn't disconnect my session. Because it wasn't
disconnected, I couldn't reconnect to the process I was running, and I
had to start over again with whatever I was doing at the time. After
I discribed this, they would always ask, even the guys that answered
"Yes....I am very familiar with IP and TCP", "Ok... that's telnet, but
what about your connection to the Internet?". After a few really
confused questions, I said "Oh...you want to know if I can discribe how
this problem effects using the HTTP protocol over the cable modem?"
A couple of them didn't understand my interpretation of the question,
a couple of them [the managers] realized how stupid their question
actually sounds to someone that actually knows about this shit.
So anyway... Tuesday the tech comes, and I was talking to him. After
5 minutes of discribing the problem, he told me that he's had 2 others
in the past week describe the same problem. I asked if they were all
running the Toshibas, he said yes.
He had a LanCity as his test modem, so we went up and tried that one
out. No problems with dropping packets. He also got quite a laugh
when he saw the ping response rates, because his 'people' had insisted
the Toshibas were much faster than the old clunky LanCity modems. With
the Toshiba, I was getting response times of 12-20 ms from my default
gateway [of course, when they weren't timing out]. With the LanCity,
the response times were 1-5 ms! Faster my ass! The LanCity, while
huge and clunky was a ton faster!
So yesterday he stopped by with a new LanCity modem for me, and took
the Toshiba back.
So the moral, aside of that their support department is a bunch of
fucking morons? If you've got one of those Toshibas, they've got
problems, and they are also slow as hell.
I can keep going on the finer points of my support calls, but I'll
only throw in a couple more. When the tech came to my house, the
first thing I asked is "Hey... does it say anywhere on you're sheets
about how big of an Asshole I am? :)"
At one point, when talking to the last guys manager about the 'policy'
of having multiple calls logged before sending a tech to the house,
I stated that I hadn't had the time to set aside to deal with them. If
I had the two hours to spend multiple times in the last 6 weeks [since
the problem began], I would have spent it looking into ISDN and DSL,
and not on the phone with the idiots that he works with.
One of the techs was convinced that the problem was related to DHCP.
I explained to him that that could only be the case if their lease
times were under a minute, and besides, if my lease was expiring,
my stack wouldn't allow the ping to go out in the first place! He
still wasn't convinced at that point.
-Jeff
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