[CLUE-Tech] DSL QoS monitoring.

[B O'Fallon]

Dan Harris wrote:

> I used to use AmericanISP also

About a month ago, I switched from AmericanISP to PCIsys. I had been a
customer of AmericanISP for almost 18 months.

At random intervals their service would go down. When I first started using
them, this happened perhaps once a month, once for two days, but more
recently might be for just a couple of hours every other month.

The reason I finally left was because I could not connect to them between
0500 - 0800 each morning. I use DSL and if I left the system on overnight,
and the connection was not broken, I had no problems with getting my mail
and browsing. But if the connection got broken (and it got broken a lot --
just about every day), I could not connect at all. It was like they were
non-existant.

Now they swore up and down that I was not connecting, and that the problem
was with Qwest's DSL service. And, of course, Qwest swore up and down that
it was AmericanISP's problem. Qwest's line checks showed that I was
connecting to AmericanISP at that time, but it was like they were ignoring
me: I would get "Hostname not found" and pings would come back timed out.

So while they swore up and down, I just swore. I finally got tired of not
being able to get my morning dose of Slashdot until 0830 or 0900, and having
to rearrange my schedule for the rest of the day, so I dropped them.

To this day, I still think that they had a block out period on me. This
problem never occurred at any other time of the day. Of course, they said
that they didn't, but it seemed suspicious that it could have been anything
else.

I have (not yet) had this problem with PCIsys. I can connect at any time,
just like a real ISP.

But I never noticed any problem with slowdown in their connections. My
downloads were usually about the same speed as with PCIsys.

BOF