

Ask HN: Does your cable ISP suck? - breck

Does your Internet Service at home or work ever seem slow at times? Do you often have to unplug and replug your modem and wireless router at random times to get back online? Does this frustrate you?<p>It happens to me too much.<p>We have Comcast Cable Internet Service at our house(up to 12Mbps) and it generally works great but:<p>* sometimes it is painfully slow.<p>* oftentimes it is more like medium than fast.<p>* at least once per week we have to go downstairs and unplug/plug-in the modem and router.<p>* I have no idea the extent of the problem because I don't have a tool that measures the speed of my internet access throughout the day!<p>I know from experience and talking to people that this is a BIG problem that happens in offices and homes across the U.S.<p>Does this happen to you? How do you deal with it? Do you know of any software that can measure my internet provider's performance?<p>(P.S. Shameless plug: If a solution doesn't exist, I plan on writing one and you can own it by bidding here: http://jobpic.com/a221 )
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stse
Here in Sweden some government agencies and a foundation (who also handles the
TLD) developed a program called tptest, which measures your speed against a
server: <http://tptest.sourceforge.net/>
<http://opensource.iis.se/trac/bbk/browser/trunk>

Now there is also a flash application available (but probably not foss)
<http://www.bredbandskollen.se/> and commercial uptime monitors like
<http://www.pingdom.com>

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icey
I don't know about testing continuously throughout the day, but you can do on-
demand tests at speedtest.net or dslreports.com

I have cox and it's hit or miss, depending on the day.

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byoung2
At home I have Time Warner Business Cable 15mb down, 2mb up. The speed tests
always report near-advertised speeds, and connectivity is reasonably reliable.

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breck
Good to know. Thanks for the data point!

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makecheck
I have no problems with the performance of SuddenLink, however I do absolutely
hate their "helpful" redirects of domain typos to crap pages.

