Internet Connections

[Pam Grassmick]

Is anyone else on the island getting dropped frequently from their internet server and unable to use Netflix? It has been extremely slow today. Given the small number of people on the service this time of year, is it just my area or more widespread?

[kboyle]

Unfortunately, we've experienced the same down on Greene's Bay. The service was essentially unusable from 6 to 8:30 and from 9 to 9:30 this morning, down again from noon to almost 3:00 p.m., and very bad from 4:30 to 6:30. It has been choppy since then. I run a program that monitors latency at 15 second increments, so the observations are more than anecdotal--though I gave up trying to get anything done online fairly early in the day today. The level of service I've described is, sadly, not unusual. It is better in town, but still up and down such that it degrades the outgoing audio streams at WVBI, which are less than 150 kbs. Uploading a file of any material size at any location brings the service to its knees (when it is up). We see that trying to move program files around. Lately, we've even been losing voice service with choppy audio and the occasional inability to make any calls off the island.

I've called TDS many times about this. While their folks on the island are hyper-responsive and the escalated support folks I always wind up with are knowledgeable and sympathetic, the problems persist.

Other than that, our service has been fine.

[kboyle]

Here is a graph that depicts the service we have received over the last 24 hours. The latency scale (in milliseconds) is shown on the left side of the graph and percentage of packet loss on the left. Good service requires latency well below 100 ms with a low percentage of packet loss, and their are periods where this is provided. But, there are extended periods where latency exceeds a half-second (which is essentially no service) and long periods where there is no connection at all (100% packet loss). (Some of these periods include time for the router to reset itself as we have a device that resets it when service drops for more than 4 minutes.) A similar plot for our internet service in Arlington (just outside of DC) would show latency below 30 ms at essentially all times (with service of 85+ mbs up and down as opposed to the 5ish down and less than 500 kbs up that we get here when the service does work). The graph and data at the top show the service for the last 60 seconds before the screen shot was taken, but in the time was I was writing this post, we had about a minute of 100% packet loss and several minutes where the latency was so high that I had to stop typing because letters were appearing on screen 30+ seconds after I entered them.

[BI Pirate]

"Other than that, our service has been fine." And, there were parts of the play Mrs. Lincoln enjoyed.