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This is a problem that someone i know is experiencing. Using optimum in connecticut he's paying for 100mb down and 35 up. Most of the time these speeds work, but around peak hours it will drop to under 2 mb up for short times, something like 5-10 minutes continuous, although the downstream will remain above 50mb. The second it returns to "normal" the upstream will return to something like 35 mb, and it can stay functional for hours until the next episode.

The company sent someone to the house and replaced all in home hardware and cables, couldn't fix it, and then washed their hands of the matter. Due to the short troubleshooting window and unpredictable nature it does make it hard to catch in the process. Regardless they should be doing something so i advised him to file a fcc complaint for now with all the relevant information.

It's above my head really but it really does interest me what could be causing such a strange issue. I don't know nearly enough about internet network infrastructure to form well educated ideas. The best i keep figuring is that something is overheating during peaks and taking care of itself, but wouldn't that effect the downstream as well?

See if you can check the cable modem logs (usual ip: 192.168.100.1) during the trouble; it might be dropping upstream channels, which will show up.

You can't really act on that info though; aside from saving the logs and using it as backup when talking to the cable company people.

Okay got that one in the works.

Log of an event, http://imgur.com/a/ShbyK

I had a similar issue when I had Comcast. During the evening when everything was being used, I'd have drop out of TV and internet. I called the multiple times, and finally they said I had too much noise on my line, and replaced my line coming from the node down the street. Never had an issue after that. You might have to pester them. I don't know if they have higher level technicians thru your provider, but that's who I would always get escalated to when I called Comcast.

I've got that in the works to but the guy is convinced that the ISP is throttling him. Either way I've got him going on getting someone out there and still waiting for feedback on the FCC complaint.

He keeps pushing throttling on them as a potential problem, which i agree is a possibility just an extremely small one. The interesting thing is that they say they don't and can't do that, but it's in their terms of service that they can and will in certain situations. At any rate, he finally managed tier 2 support and they're sending out another tech, we'll see what happens.

On a related note, i finally found the words to describe my irritation with situations like this. The problem is that absolutely no one in that company has any responsibility to help him on an individual basis, as long as the average numbers are good enough. Very irritating, but i supposed that's why the fcc is around. The fcc issued their whatever to his provider, optimum, and we'll see if that has any effect since they supposedly need to respond within 30 days.

Heiwashin wrote:

On a related note, i finally found the words to describe my irritation with situations like this. The problem is that absolutely no one in that company has any responsibility to help him on an individual basis, as long as the average numbers are good enough.

It's even worse when the person(s) screwing with you are people in the IT department of your own employer. The bigger the company, the worse it tends to be (though my current employer is frikkin' huge, and I've seen waaaay worse IT departments, so it's not a perfect correlation).

"No, you're not supposed to open high priority tickets, because if we don't respond to those within two hours it makes our metrics look bad!"

"We can't figure out why your e-mail hasn't worked for a week, so we're closing the ticket. If it still isn't working please open another one." (Of course it still isn't working, you haven't fixed anything you morons!)

"Yes, our front-line phone support person is deaf. But she's using a speech-to-text app so what's the issue?" (And here we all thought she was drinking on the job because her speech was always slurred and she could never understand anything anyone said!)

"Oh, when you said you wanted off-site backups of this data, you meant somewhere at another location... not just a server in a different rack in your server room?"

^ Real incidents from previous places I've worked. I could go on and on.

If you just assume up front that a substantial percentage of people you'll need to deal with in daily life will be idiots, your stress level will be much lower. When things go well you'll be pleasantly surprised... and when things go badly, you won't be (too) disappointed. It's a matter of effectively managing your own expectations...

I sometimes think the IT departments I have to deal with are bad, and then I see things like that.

Around here, it's just that nobody seems to see the problem with logout buttons being non-functional (which they have been to some degree or other for years - IT credibly blames Microsoft).

just brew it! wrote:

"Yes, our front-line phone support person is deaf. But she's using a speech-to-text app so what's the issue?" (And here we all thought she was drinking on the job because her speech was always slurred and she could never understand anything anyone said!)

I'm all for not discriminating. It just seems like this is a hard career choice this person made.

Then again, maybe it's the easiest choice because the machine should theoretically help.

Lord, I never want to go deaf.

derFunkenstein wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

"Yes, our front-line phone support person is deaf. But she's using a speech-to-text app so what's the issue?" (And here we all thought she was drinking on the job because her speech was always slurred and she could never understand anything anyone said!)

I'm all for not discriminating. It just seems like this is a hard career choice this person made.

Then again, maybe it's the easiest choice because the machine should theoretically help.

Lord, I never want to go deaf.

The thing that never made any sense to me was why they didn't have her dealing with the issues that were submitted through the web ticketing system, instead of answering the phone. Every call was inevitably frustrating for both her and the user, since communicating effectively was so difficult.