
My ISP has a poor service record. I made a tool to test how shitty it is - g4m8i7
http://www.iscableoneshitty.com
======
g4m8i7
EDIT: Well, this got more popular than I ever expected. Resizing the linode
now. Should be back up soon.

After months of fighting with CableOne about speed and service problems, I
decided to finally spice up my website dedicated to their poor service:
www.iscableoneshitty.com

Now, instead of just saying "YES," it gives an actual representation of the
quality of the connection to my house. The server pings my modem 5 times at
the top of every minute. It takes the response times and averages them.

If the average response time is <60ms, it reads "NOT CURRENTLY."

If the average response time is between 60 and 100ms, it reads "MOSTLY."

If the average response time is >100ms and <150ms, it reads "YES."

If the average response time is >150ms, it reads "VERY YES."

I've distributed to friends and neighbors in the area, because almost every
one in my town is on CableOne for lack of other choices, so they can check and
see if at least someone else is having trouble.

I have thoughts of actually tracking the data and compiling monthly reports of
downtime and slowness, I just haven't gotten around to that yet.

~~~
readme
This could be expanded to include more companies. I think having a real time
snapshot of the reliability of all companies would be cool.

~~~
lwhalen
They have one. It's called www.internetpulse.com :-)

------
grizzles
I just went through a 2 month ordeal with my ISP trying to get basic service.
It's working now so I think it's resolved for the moment but I don't have much
faith in them. Unfortunately I'm expecting further outages.

I thought about making a tool like this as well as crazier ideas like getting
my lawyer to sue them for their incompetence - as it happens they are my only
option for broadband.

What I'd like and I think alot of other customers would like is a little app
to run on my computers that tracks when my internet connection goes down and
for exactly how long. I pay a fixed amount monthly. As I'm concerned that pro-
rata amount of lost connection time should be refunded to me from the ISP.
There is no incentive for them to get better unless they lose money from their
shit service.

I think it'd be a good adware product to cover basic expenses, and maybe some
money could be made by taking a peice of crowd funded lawsuits vs ISPs. With
my ISPs customer base, I don't think it'd be too hard to find contributors...

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falcolas
It's more dramatic, and historically useful, to pipe the output from ping into
Graphite, and keep a few months worth of data. Really shuts up the techs who
come over and say everything's fine.

~~~
ajsharma
I dont suppose you have a tool that does this? I've been pondering building
one, but I'd rather just skip to the part where I can start complaining about
my service :p

~~~
falcolas
It's not on a machine I have access to right now, but I'm fairly certain it
went something like:

    
    
        while [ "true" ]
        do
            printf 'google_ping %f %s' $(ping -c1 www.google.com | awk '/ms/ {print $7};' | awk -F '=' '{print $2};') $(date +%s) | nc graphite_host 2003
            sleep 10
        done

~~~
tokenizerrr
fwiw I use

    
    
        ping -n www.google.com | awk '/ms/ {split($7,p,"="); print "ping.google " p[2] " " strftime("%s")}; fflush()' | nc -q0 127.0.0.1 2003 &

~~~
falcolas
I bow before your awk-fu. :)

------
acomjean
I worked at a company that made electricity usage monitors. The little boxes
would send data to us with energy usage every minute.

We could see how often internet went down, based on how many times the boxes
sent us "stored" data.

We didn't do any analysis on the data, but we did note that the residential
internet while good isn't as always on as you think it should be. We were
wondering how much of a problem this was going to be for home automation. (It
would be frustrating not to be able to connect)

Also of note in the three years I was there before I left, its seemed to be
getting better. It might be that the business switched more to corporate
customers and there internet was better. We ended up doing some thermostat
control and it worked for the most part (Most wifi thermostats are kinda
crappy, thus the rise of the nest)

~~~
defineclean
The question is, is it that corporate internet is that much better, or that
they're just more diligent about making sure that their internet never goes
down?

In other words: a residential customer is more likely to accidentally unplug
their modem, or maybe flip a lightswitch that controls an outlet that the
modem is plugged into, or accidentally flip the switch on their surge
protector, or turn their modems off at night to save electricity, or to have
old/bad cabling running from the telephone poles that need replacing.

~~~
acomjean
>or that they're just more diligent about making sure that their internet
never goes down?

I think that has something to do with it. Business too have blocks of time
(nights) when the internet can go down and nobody is going to call for
service. I wasn't involved with the network provisioning but often we were put
on the same network as the "guest wifi" as opposed to the business network or
the network with the cash registers (for security reasons)

------
ademarre
It would be helpful to see this graphed over time. Also, how do you rule out
service quality problems at the server's end?

~~~
g4m8i7
Yeah, graphing is a thing I'll probably implement. It would be useful to use
as a tool when fighting with them.

I currently don't account for that. I guess I could ping something always
stable like 8.8.8.8 or something as a baseline to compare against.

------
afniljl
Is the site up? I can't seem to get in. I really want a tool to have data to
complain to my ISP. Shitty leased line service i am getting.

------
silver1
Cant open your website but it seems that you're creating something like
IhateRogers.ca ---> a candian ISP :)

------
cwsx
Hey, I'd recommend changing your font-size from 200pt to 16vw(ish). This
should make it fully responsive.

~~~
simoncion
Points _are_ fully responsive. They correspond to the on-screen physical size
of the text. (See
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_%28typography%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_%28typography%29)
)

If the text doesn't fit on your screen -as it fails to on mine-, then either
your screen is physically too small (as mine is), or your user-agent (or
windowing system, or display, or video card drivers) is broken.

~~~
cwsx
While you're totally correct, the point implementation fails to display the
content correctly across all devices, hence it's not really responsive in the
standard 'responsive design' definition.

~~~
simoncion
If your intent is to display letters that are X inches high, then points
correctly display textual content on all devices that:

* Know how large their display is

* Know the display's DPI

* Can correctly communicate this information to the underlying windowing system and applications

(Note that it is highly unlikely that _any_ high-end "mobile" device fails to
perform any of the items in the bulleted list.)

The designer wanted letters that were five inches high. It's not the
designer's fault that your screen is too small. :)

Do you disagree that it is important to have a display-density-independent
method of specifying the physical size of text or (for that matter) an image?

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Koldark
How did you implement this? I would like to use this to monitor my ISP as
well.

------
coolnow
Hmm, right now, your website has a poor service record as well.

~~~
g4m8i7
That's unfortunate. My little 512Mb Linode apparently couldn't handle it. It's
back up for the moment.

Edit: Scratch that. Resizing to a larger linode now. This got far more traffic
than I ever expected it would.

~~~
jonathanoliver
Linode has a maximum packet per second limit set by default on all nodes.
You'll need to email them to have them remove the limit for this particular
box. They're very responsive and will increase it within a few minutes. No
matter how big your instance is, there's probably way too many packets hitting
it right now.

~~~
g4m8i7
Ah. Good to know. This is just running on a personal test box. I'll email
them, though I think the wave is over anyway.

Thanks :)

