What do you do when your Home ISP is down?

Thu Aug 18 19:38:42 UTC 2011

On Aug 18, 2011, at 10:21 AM, Mark Keymer wrote:

> I am wondering what some of you guys do when your home ISP is down. At
> least those of you that don't give yourself internet.

I'm on Cox Business Services, a Cable Modem network. The bad news: I pay more for less bandwidth. The good news: I don't have a lot of "it stopped working" problems. Once upon a time when I had frame relay access to the house, I might one day see 30 ms RTT to Cisco and the next see 500 ms. I once was measuring RTT to Cisco using PingPlotter (for those of you with Windows machines, it's a great diagnostic tool) and was able to measure a DDOS happening at Cisco (stable RTT all along the path from here to there, but from the first Cisco campus machine on it was crazy). A couple of weeks ago my delay at the house suddenly jumped at 2:00 AM; for sanity's sake I checked ping RTT to the Cox router in front of me and saw the same behavior. My guess: one if the computers in the house decided to download a large patch to be updated in the next day. For the most part, thats the extent of the issues I see.

When I do see an issue, I call Cox and slog it through. Yes, I get ID-ten-T problems, and I get people that think the problem is between my chair and my keyboard. Generally speaking, I get courteous service and the problem eventually gets fixed.