To bring everyone up to speed. I've been having major latency/packet loss issues at random intervals over the past month. We're talking 1 in 10 packets dropped kind of issues. Time Warner couldn't explain it.

I finally got in touch with one of their Supervising Engineers who I told what I knew that the problem was either the first hop or something between the tap (the box on the side of your house) and that first hop. I even gave him the IP of the first hop.

I sent him logs of pings I would do once ever 10 seconds to the first hop and you could see the times on the graph it made when it happened. Originally he thought there was some bad connection that was being affected by temperature, it was worse at night.

He contacted me yesterday about it and said they finally found the problem. He explained it as this (please key in network people) that the "hub" as he calls it, has 4 cards in it. Each card supports about 500 people. The hub itself was malfunctioning due to some idiot in a backhoe working on the construction backing into it.

I asked how he knew that and he said because the hub box was at a 45 degree angle when I finally found it behind a downed tree. It seems the construction going on at the business park on jones franklin was the cause.

This affects up to 2000 people in the area behind crossroads plaza, and between the beltlines on Jones Franklin. They have ordered a new hub but it will be approximately 15-20 days before it is installed.

Just letting those in the area know!

3/27/2007 6:27:38 AM

Not sure if this is the cause of the same sorta issue at Lake Park off avent ferry, but here is to hoping, I love sitting at <100ms latency then all of a sudden it spikes to over 1000 then back down again quite randomly. Hurts that whole gaming thing pretty bad.

3/27/2007 8:06:21 AM

The typical behavior was fine during the day when there weren't many online but about 3pm and on it would do the following

3pm - 150+ ms
4pm - 200+
5pm - 220+
6pm - 250+
7pm - 280+
8pm - 300+
9pm - 300-500ms
10pm - 400-600ms
11pm - 600-2000ms
12pm - 600-2000ms
1am - 600-2000ms
2am - 300-500ms
3am - 120-200ms
4am - 100-120ms
5am on - normal

That's a typical day. If you run a standard 25 ping, you get 8% loss. You run a 100 you get 6-8%. If you run 1 ping every 10 seconds for 24 hours you average 6% loss. This sounds like I did a lot of work but it was really the tool that did it for me. Very helpful thing.

3/27/2007 8:16:20 AM