What to do when your ISP off-shores tech support

Tue Dec 30 16:30:56 UTC 2008

Matthew Black wrote:
> I've had difficulties reaching anyone with a brain
> at my DSL provider Verizon California.
>
> I can reliably ping the first hop from my home to
> the CO with a 25ms delay. But if I ping any other
> location, packets get dropped or significantly
> delayed. To me, this sounds like Verizon has an
> internal routing problem rather than a problem
> with my phone line. Note that it rained recently
> in our area and the cable vault in front of my
> is usually covered with stagnant water because
> the gutters don't drain it away.
>
> I have tried to explain this to tech support but
> they refuse to go off script, even the supervisors.
> They keep insisting on sending a tech to my home
> when I suggest this should be escalated to their
> network operations team.
>
> Anyhow, if I can reliably ping the first hop
> from my home, would that eliminate my telephone
> connection as part of the problem? Just a sanity
> check on my part. Thanks.
>
> matthew black
> california state university, long beach
>
Are you seeing drops or slow response times for the Verizon hops but not 
for the last hop destination?

If so, remember that most of the larger ISPs will be rate limiting 
non-admin (ie from their support network ranges) traffic directed to the 
enterprise equipment.   This means they will either ignore or delay 
responding to ICMP requests directed to their own IP addresses vs 
forwarding traffic.

If your seeing about the same for the destination and for the 
intermediate hops then it's more likely an issue on the Verizon network.

-- 
James Michael Keller