poor BH customer service/slow RR in afternoon

[a_d_drummer]

Has anyone been experiencing slow roadrunner in the afternoon? Every afternoon roadrunner grinds to a near halt. This has been going on for about two weeks. I contacted BH and explained that I get good speeds when I run a speed test at speakeasy.net in the morning but in the afternoon the same test is about 66% slower on the downstream and 90% slower on the upstream. Meaning the upstream is almost zero. Their expert said they'd send a truck to my house in eight days. I explained the problem is external as the speed drops as people come home from work and get on this node. She agreed but said that's the way it is. So I spoke to two of my neighbors to verify it was not just me. They both reacted by saying how awful rr has been. Is there anything I can do to get BH to fix this problem any quicker? I've already got pricing on Fios but I am opposed strongly to contracts so I'm hesitate to switch but if BH does not step up I will be forced to.

By the way it took me this long to call them because I've been out of town. Ever try troubleshooting something like this over the phone with your wife?!?!? Now as to why none of neighbors called is beyond me. They both said they'd call now but who really knows if they do.

[JamesD]

what part of the world do you live in?

tampa or orlando? city? zip?

hit me up on pm

[skottey]

Has anyone been experiencing slow roadrunner in the afternoon? Every afternoon roadrunner grinds to a near halt. This has been going on for about two weeks. I contacted BH and explained that I get good speeds when I run a speed test at speakeasy.net in the morning but in the afternoon the same test is about 66% slower on the downstream and 90% slower on the upstream. Meaning the upstream is almost zero. Their expert said they'd send a truck to my house in eight days. I explained the problem is external as the speed drops as people come home from work and get on this node. She agreed but said that's the way it is. So I spoke to two of my neighbors to verify it was not just me. They both reacted by saying how awful rr has been. Is there anything I can do to get BH to fix this problem any quicker? I've already got pricing on Fios but I am opposed strongly to contracts so I'm hesitate to switch but if BH does not step up I will be forced to.

By the way it took me this long to call them because I've been out of town. Ever try troubleshooting something like this over the phone with your wife?!?!? Now as to why none of neighbors called is beyond me. They both said they'd call now but who really knows if they do.

I have business RR for my home office and I believe I get priority traffic because my own connection doesn't have such problems. However, I do computer service for a living and some, not all, of my RR residential customers have had crazy problems lately. At first I thought it was just the weather, as I see this every year when the rainy season hits, but I soon realized something else is going on.

It is funny you say "in the afternoon." I see it happening anytime during normal business hours. One thing I suggest is that you use different DNS servers. This won't help all problems but if you are slow to resolve names, it will help. I use OpenDNS personally, set to pass through (you can have them filter and block ads by known sites but you may block things you want to see in the process, so I just have it resolve everything).

Keep us informed about your problems. Most of my customers are in St. Petersburg. I think it actually started around the time they put SDV into place on the TV side. I am not saying that is at fault, but something else may have changed at that time.

Hopefully, they will get this resolved and are working on it. At least they don't deny problems for the most part. I mean, when I call on a customer's behalf and tell them I do this for a living and lots of people are having problems, the higher support levels will readily tell me something is going on. So they are pretty good about it. It is the occasional idiot they send out that annoys me because at that point I am gone. I'll tell my customer to have him check the line and everything and the tech will walk in and try to tell them it is their computer. OK, fair enough. If the software loaded on their computer is causing RR to run slow (even with 968 dropped connections to the modem in the last two weeks between RR and the modem), how come it does the same thing when I hook up one or two of my own laptops in their house? I tell the customer "Don't let them tell you it is your computer, I tested my laptop on your connection and it is doing the same thing," and then the tech comes out and blames the computer. I call them for a follow up, "he said I have too much AOL stuff on my computer." So that is onsite techs for you. The guys on the second and third level support aren't that stupid. They will admit there is a problem. Whether they can tell you what it is or not is another question. But they don't just deny it and cast blame.

[Kendo]

Has anyone been experiencing slow roadrunner in the afternoon? Every afternoon roadrunner grinds to a near halt.

I had this problem years ago - it's the number one reason (not to mention the other 9) I left BHN and went to FiOS. Since then it's been smooth surfing ever since (20/5 service).

I went through the service calls, rebooting modem, router, computers and was finally told I had spyware (that no anti-spyware program could find). It's funny how that spyware disappeared on FiOS.

[skottey]

I had this problem years ago - it's the number one reason (not to mention the other 9) I left BHN and went to FiOS. Since then it's been smooth surfing ever since (20/5 service).

I went through the service calls, rebooting modem, router, computers and was finally told I had spyware (that no anti-spyware program could find). It's funny how that spyware disappeared on FiOS.

All the technology companies pass the blame. I see it all the time with things like HP printer support blaming Vista, Vista support blaming HP hardware, RR blaming your PC, Symantec blaming WIndows, etc... it never ends. It is always a good idea to back up that it isn't your computer with any ISP by getting a friend to bring a laptop over to do ping minus tee (ping www.google.com -t) and speedtests. Obviously if you have a router it should be taken out for troubleshooting and the PC directly connected. Also, don't forget to power off the modem and back on since RR ties to the MAC address of the device it is connected to until rebooted. If the person has the phone service too, the back up battery needs to come out and back in.

it is so easy to blame a PC because common folk don't know much about their PC. So all the ISPs do that. I love waiting until they have blamed the PC to reveal that I have connected a different laptop and still get the problem. They go silent, "yeah, we better send somebody out." Again, I have had as many blames from other ISPs, in all fairness to RR. It happens a lot with Verizon DSL (not so much FIOS).

Verizon must find it odd that their FIOS subscribers get less spyware than their DSL customers. It couldn't be that FIOS rarely goes down and DSL goes down often, could it? But they always blame the computer too.

I'm the only one that wins in this blame game (not because I am blaming, but because I am being paid to deal with the problems). The ISP blames the customer's PC and the customer gets so frustrated. The customer ends up paying a computer person like me and it turns out to be the ISP (customer loses). The ISP is wasting resources via support and sending somebody out (ISP loses).

Crazy, it is!

[AmelFl]

same problem here

during the day, it slows down

I also had the dropouts on audio and video

always something, but, as I am, no big deal as long as it works to some extend

[a_d_drummer]

Here is a little more detail. I'm paying for 7 by 1 service. On a typical afternoon and evening speed drops to 2 meg or so down and 50 k upstream. In the morning speeds are near 7 meg downstream and 500 K up. I sometimes get near 800 up but that is rare. The upstream speed sometimes gets near zero. I use bos.speakeasy.net to run speed test. Of course my Vonage stops working. I'm in the countryway area my zip is 33635. The last two afternoons/evenings since calling BH/RR we have not had as dramatic a drop in speeds which may have something to do with the holiday.

I did try changing my DNS to OpenDNS as was suggested as resolving names has been slow also. It may helped a bit with finding sites.

Thanks for the all input.

[JamesD]

someone needs to come out and check the system configuration in your area

it sounds like a utilization problem. yes, some rumors are true about cable and multiple users, but it is easily corrected by managing the load properly.

as far as business class customers. you are on the same cable plant as residential (unless on a specific business only ring), but it is routed differently in the data center. Business class uses different dns servers than residential customers do (all are accessible by both though for redundancy) to help manage the load, and I believe a form of QoS is used to give higher priority to business data and business telephone (as well as residential phone) over residential data

the trick with dealing with speed issues is not using speakeasy.net, or speedtest.net, brighthouse wants you to use their speed test site

http://speedtest.cfl.rr.com this is directed to their network ops center in Tampa. You can also hit http://speedtest.tampabay.rr.com (same as cfl) or hit a TWC speedtest at http://speedtest.nyc.rr.com

all should show similar numbers and should provide at least 85% of advertised speed (in my personal opinion)

[a_d_drummer]

OK, just hit your tests James and got 6678 K by 370 k , 6694 by 443 on the second and 6820 by 330 at TWC. Acceptable performance. So for now things are working OK. I'll keep watching it. I suspect come Monday afternoon we may have some slow downs. One other note. When I spoke with high speed person, Rachel, she ran some test and said, "there is some packet loss". Thanks for the help.

[skottey]

someone needs to come out and check the system configuration in your area

it sounds like a utilization problem. yes, some rumors are true about cable and multiple users, but it is easily corrected by managing the load properly.

as far as business class customers. you are on the same cable plant as residential (unless on a specific business only ring), but it is routed differently in the data center. Business class uses different dns servers than residential customers do (all are accessible by both though for redundancy) to help manage the load, and I believe a form of QoS is used to give higher priority to business data and business telephone (as well as residential phone) over residential data

the trick with dealing with speed issues is not using speakeasy.net, or speedtest.net, brighthouse wants you to use their speed test site

http://speedtest.cfl.rr.com this is directed to their network ops center in Tampa. You can also hit http://speedtest.tampabay.rr.com (same as cfl) or hit a TWC speedtest at http://speedtest.nyc.rr.com

all should show similar numbers and should provide at least 85% of advertised speed (in my personal opinion)

The business traffic is riding over the same pipe but but biz traffic is given priority, as it should be. They do use different DNS servers but that doesn't matter anyway as their DNS servers are all pretty bad. You can use any DNS servers you want and I suggest OpenDNS or even the Verizon DNS servers, not the RR DNS servers.

Using their RR speedtest sites are OK to test your home to them but realize, it never leaves their network and hits the public Internet during such a test. So if it is slower than what you are supposed to get, that is a problem between you and the RR network. But if an Internet based speedtest site is coming up slow (try multiple ones) it could very well be a bottleneck between RR and the public Internet.

I think there is a network problem with RR but they have plenty of bandwidth out to the public Internet. I think their priority and routing is messed up and some areas are seriously overloaded. You should also be able to ping -t public sites like google with no breaks (request timed out) in communication. On a good connection, you may get the very occasional (like less than 2 an hour) "request timed out" when pinging google.com consistently. If every five or six pings gets a time out (and I have seen this with RR during non-outages for people) this is a problem.

[JamesD]

they want you to hit the RR speed tests to make sure the local network is working

if it drops outside of the network, it technically doesn't fall on their shoulders, it then becomes the wan backbone and interconnects issues (att, level3, etc)

don't know if you remember the dsl outage in texas last year, but all traffic was rerouted through chicago, and any time you hit a server in california (and there are a LOT of sites hosted on the west coast), it took forever... RR, verizon, embarq, whoever on the east coast couldn't do anything until att got the issues taken care of

[CapnBry]

I think there is a network problem with RR but they have plenty of bandwidth out to the public Internet. I think their priority and routing is messed up and some areas are seriously overloaded. You should also be able to ping -t public sites like google with no breaks (request timed out) in communication. On a good connection, you may get the very occasional (like less than 2 an hour) "request timed out" when pinging google.com consistently. If every five or six pings gets a time out (and I have seen this with RR during non-outages for people) this is a problem.
This is actually why I am here. I've been working with RR in Tampa for the past 3 weeks trying to figure out why my Internet goes in the dumps in the evening. Anywhere between 5pm and 9pm the connection starts dropping ~10% of my packets and stays that way until I go to sleep, about midnight. I've also hopped on a neighbor's open wireless and gotten the same results, 0% loss to his router but 10% to the first hop past that and every hop after. A friend about 3 miles away has perfect internet at this time.

The best part is they can see it happening "Ooh yeah I'm getting a lot of drops pinging your modem" but still haven't involved engineering. I've already had 2 people come out to check my equipment, which checks out perfectly (especially since they're here when everything is working great). I'm trying to figure out what my next move is, since every time I call I go through the whole
Me: "It's dropping 10% of my packets, web sites take forever to load, gaming or streaming video unusable"
Them: "So the web is slow? Probably the site!"
Me: "No, every site. Your site. The speedtest site. 10% packet loss with ping to every hop!"
Them: "Soo intermittent connectivity? Your modem has good signal."
Me: :confused:

Does someone know how to escalate this because calling them every other day for an hour+ with their "I can certainly assist you problem you're having with this Mr Mayland" speech is getting on my nerves.

[skottey]

This is actually why I am here. I've been working with RR in Tampa for the past 3 weeks trying to figure out why my Internet goes in the dumps in the evening. Anywhere between 5pm and 9pm the connection starts dropping ~10% of my packets and stays that way until I go to sleep, about midnight. I've also hopped on a neighbor's open wireless and gotten the same results, 0% loss to his router but 10% to the first hop past that and every hop after. A friend about 3 miles away has perfect internet at this time.

The best part is they can see it happening "Ooh yeah I'm getting a lot of drops pinging your modem" but still haven't involved engineering. I've already had 2 people come out to check my equipment, which checks out perfectly (especially since they're here when everything is working great). I'm trying to figure out what my next move is, since every time I call I go through the whole
Me: "It's dropping 10% of my packets, web sites take forever to load, gaming or streaming video unusable"
Them: "So the web is slow? Probably the site!"
Me: "No, every site. Your site. The speedtest site. 10% packet loss with ping to every hop!"
Them: "Soo intermittent connectivity? Your modem has good signal."
Me: :confused:

Does someone know how to escalate this because calling them every other day for an hour+ with their "I can certainly assist you problem you're having with this Mr Mayland" speech is getting on my nerves.

Keep at them and demand a supervisor. You seem to know what you are talking about (most customers don't know what packets are or what it means to ping, so they blame the customers computer due to ignorance). Aside from them pinging your modem, they actually have a log of the modem's connectivity to their end. I just had one two weeks ago where the lady had the modem replaced two weeks prior (it died from lightning) and when I called I easily got escalated and the second or third level support rep at the local support level (not the Indian call center) looked at the log and specifically said it has lost communication 986 times. He had an exact number. Not between the computer and their end, but between their modem and their end. I don't know if they have alerts for this stuff at their end or they wait for the customer to call in. What if somebody didn't know what to do? I wonder if they would just let it go. Since they have the logs you would think they would be alerted before a customer calls in.

I've been doing computer residential support in St Pete full time since 2003, part time since 2001, and there are certain neighborhoods that have way more problems than other neighborhoods. For example, Tanglewood in St. Pete for example all along has had major issues off and on while Shore Acres and Snell are just fine for the most part. Areas that are one way in peninsulas like Venetian or Tropical Shores tend to have somewhat more than average problems too (this could be because they are on the water and have buried utilities that flood and are harder for techs to get at the line). But lately all these problems seem to be way worse. They have actually had outages where they have blamed the customer's computer. My customers are the type that call me first when they cannot get online. So I will get like three or four calls in a neighborhood, which is clearly an RR problem. I'll tell them it is an RR problem (since I am getting multiple calls from my customers) and they are welcome to pay me to come out and call or call themselves. When one of us calls in these circumstances I have actually had RR say that it is the computer. haha... then I tell them that I have three other customers in the vicinity with problems and then they fess up.

Just be persistent. Don't give up.

All around Roadrunner is good. I have way more customers using RR than Verizon DSL or FIOS or any other form of connection. They are overall reliable but something is definitely going on lately. Good luck.

[JamesD]

the older areas of town tend to have a little bit more on the trouble side than say newer developments. technology has changed over the years, so the equipment deployed now is a lot better than what was installed a decade or so ago. newer plant designs, etc handle the multiple levels of service far better than stuff designed for one way traffic (TV only).

and you are right about the isolated areas, there are only so many utility easements to get there, and if the line is broken, it can take out an island (or two).

most of the ISPs have a way to track connectivity between the modem and the host (be it a cmts, router, whatever) and can provide the call rep with information regarding the connection and most points along the way.

i dont want to get into it too much, but you can see neighborhood information and view results for the past few weeks, (or course the sampling average is wider the larger the range) so problems can definitely be tracked to when they started if the problems are caught soon enough. they have utilities to track a modems lifetime usage and history (easy to find hacked modems this way).

Do they have a team trending and tracking issues? yes, the system also does it itself. for example: the system will auto generate an outage if a small group of people in one node's service area call in for no cable service, or if so many say a channel is out. they also have a group watching for issues that may pop up that the system doesn't catch, you know how computer systems are, could be set for so many calls in a certain window.. but if only a few people call at 11pm, and the issue is present all night, but everyone is sleeping.. well the next few calls wont come until 8am, by that time the window has expired, so it would have to start again. not saying this was the case, but shed some light for those not in the business.

despite all the monitoring tools, they tend to track only the main components: routers, nodes, power supplies, etc. it is extremely difficult to monitor every single modem and digital box on the network all the time. it is also more expensive and requires more manpower, which is why dedicated access fiber optic service is offered (24hr monitoring, 2hr response time)

[CapnBry]

Thanks for the insight guys. I've usually been happy with the RoadRunner service, this just started happening about a month ago so I'm not really sure what happened. In any event, my line is now "under observation" so hopefully that will give them the answers they need to fix it. I'll just stick with it!

[Kendo]

the trick with dealing with speed issues is not using speakeasy.net, or speedtest.net, brighthouse wants you to use their speed test site

http://speedtest.cfl.rr.com this is directed to their network ops center in Tampa. You can also hit http://speedtest.tampabay.rr.com (same as cfl) or hit a TWC speedtest at http://speedtest.nyc.rr.com

all should show similar numbers and should provide at least 85% of advertised speed (in my personal opinion)

For my own amusement I ran the RR Speed test listed above on my FiOS! My download was 18.8 mb/s and upload was 3.95.

Speedtest.net had me running at 20.7 Mb/s down and 4.6 up. I have 20/5 service.

[skottey]

For my own amusement I ran the RR Speed test listed above on my FiOS! My download was 18.8 mb/s and upload was 3.95.

Speedtest.net had me running at 20.7 Mb/s down and 4.6 up. I have 20/5 service.

Yeah, I just do a RR speedtest from al providers and connections (whether they have DSL, FIOS, ISDN, T-1, dial-up....hehe... dial up) along with other speedtests. it is just one off the top of my head. Obviously it is hitting the public Internet and then the RR network when you are hitting it outside RR. But for RR people it is never hitting the public Internet and gives them a good idea of speed between home and the RR network.

FIOS almost always gives you your bandwidth, unless of course you are watching HD VOD,then it will drop on the download portion.

[a_d_drummer]

Here is a little more detail. I'm paying for 7 by 1 service. On a typical afternoon and evening speed drops to 2 meg or so down and 50 k upstream. In the morning speeds are near 7 meg downstream and 500 K up. I sometimes get near 800 up but that is rare. The upstream speed sometimes gets near zero. I use bos.speakeasy.net to run speed test. Of course my Vonage stops working. I'm in the countryway area my zip is 33635. The last two afternoons/evenings since calling BH/RR we have not had as dramatic a drop in speeds which may have something to do with the holiday.

I did try changing my DNS to OpenDNS as was suggested as resolving names has been slow also. It may helped a bit with finding sites.

Thanks for the all input.

Well here's an update. Today at 4:00 pm BH/RR fell off the cliff on the upstream. The downstream speed is 6800K but the downstream is all but zero. I've measured about 50 k to 5 k upstream. So nearly zero. I've tested using http://speedtest.cfl.rr.com/ as well as speakeasy. Sometimes the upstream test won't even run. By the way this morning the upstream was 500 K. The RR super Tech should be here tomorrow. Hopefully he's more knowledgeable then the tech support in the Philippines!

Don't know if I mentioned this earlier but spoke with two neighbors. One described Brighthouse RR service as "crap" and the other stop using it and is using his aircard only. Told RR this but they don't seem to care. They've lost three of six homes in my cul-de-sac to Verizon. I guess they want to lose the remaining three.

Well the "truck rolls" to my house tomorrow eight days after calling. I'll update afterwards. Should be interesting.

[JamesD]

eight days?



wow....


little hard to track a problem after 8 days

[a_d_drummer]

For the record it's 6:50 am and my speeds are back to usable, that being 6800K down and 480K up. Let's hope it drops off again when the brighthouse tech gets here this afternoon.

[FTBoomerIII]

Here's my current reading, can't complain:

[skottey]

Here's my current reading, can't complain:

Speedboost... or Speedburst... whatever they are calling it... where the first few seconds of a download will get up to 30Mbps.... you won't hold a steady stream at that rate. But I'm sure you'll hold steady at 20Mbps.

Just so you know I am not pulling this out of my you know what, I asked them about this as I was seeing it myself. I asked if they gave us a speed increase and they explained it was that speedboost thing they are marketing now. Works well for small downloads because they are that much quicker.

I regularly download 400MB-1GB DLC from xbox live and PSN in 5 minutes or less, so I am not complaining.

[a_d_drummer]

Update time. Well two technicians later and the problem is not solved. The first guy was a "computer" guy. He came in the house and I showed him the situation. He took a look at the signal levels to the modem by logging in at 192.168.100.1. The level was low so he called another guy who then did some test and said my cable in the yard was bad. So he came back today and replaced the buried cable and the tap at the curb. This did improve signal level.

Despite this late today at 4:45 pm my upstream speeds drops from 485k to about 50k. The downstream speed is still at the normal speed of 6800 k.

So I called BH again was of course transferred to the Philippines. After explaining it again he transferred me to Tampa. From there the Tech scheduled for a Supervisor Technician to come out next week Thursday after 4:00pm.

[Jason]

I'm not sure what they've been doing lately, but I've seen a lot of Bright House issues in recent weeks throughout the area.

- During upgrades to DOCSIS 3.0 in my area, I lost phone service several times over a one-week period. After resetting the box, I would have service for as long as eight hours, or as little as 15 minutes, before having to reset the box. They found the cause and corrected it, but I'm not sure it should have ever happened, if proper testing was done before making upgrades in the field.

- On Thursday and Friday, they had been pushing upgrades to cable modems (Seems to be mostly Zyxel business equipment). I noticed an increase in calls to my office (I work for a company that services systems in area restaurants), from businesses that lost Internet access. I personally dealt with three sites, scattered throughout Hillsborough and Pinellas. As of Friday, I couldn't resolve two sites, and referred them back to Bright House. The third site was finally reissued new static IP addresses by BH, which corrected the problem. Again, I think BH could have probably done a better job in testing the upgrade process before full-scale implementation. (A quick check this morning, shows the affected sites have finally been restored.)

One site told me about his experiences with BH tech support over the previous 24 hours. The first three agents he spoke to, admitted there were system problems. The fourth tried to blame the location's equipment, refused to admit a problem on their side, and refused to escalate the case.

- We also can't forget the large-scale outage that occurred about a month ago, big enough to make the local news.

I know they are trying to add services and increase data speeds, but if it comes that the expense of reliability, it's just not worth it.

[a_d_drummer]

Well so much for a Technician Supervisor coming out. They sent technician out who's prior experience was laying tile. He changed a few cables in the house and swapped out the modem. No change still can't get any faster then 485K upstream. My neighbor saw the truck out front and came over to tell him how terrible roadrunner has been.

The technician said I was told a Supervisor would come out just to get me off the phone. My neighbors experience has been just as bad. When he called brighthouse they asked him to run the speedtest. Things were so bad that their speedtest would not even run. They told him to call back when it was working.

At this point I'm ready to switch to Verizon. My wife would like to stick with brighthouse since they cost less and I personally hate contracts but this is pathetic on brighthouse's part.

[a_d_drummer]

Just filed a complaint with the FCC. Maybe it will wake them up.