3 ms·

You'd be surprised how hard it is to identify SHINE. In places like this, you'll probably find the fastest broadband available is actually ADSL2+ - which is hig

by kn100 6y ago

You'd be surprised how hard it is to identify SHINE. In places like this, you'll probably find the fastest broadband available is actually ADSL2+ - which is highly susceptible to noise, and in some places in the UK the lines which run to peoples houses aren't even copper, they're ALU - which is obviously not ideal. Even the tiniest of things can have an enormous impact on line performance. I worked at a UK ISP a couple years back and lets just say the 'monitoring' that ISPS have is extremely limited. Openreach (the company that manages the phone lines, which ISPs lease) almost certainly has more monitoring but the problem is the customer calls the ISP, and the ISP then tells Openreach - which means there's a fairly huge disconnect between the customer and the engineers fixing the line.

tialaramex 6y ago
> I worked at a UK ISP a couple years back and lets just say the 'monitoring' that ISPS have is extremely limited. That's a choice. Presumably a cost conscious choice, not a limit imposed by Openreach. A&A presents each customer with a live updated chart of bandwidth usage, latency, and low-level polling of the DSL modem in the customer's home. If your line drops even if you aren't "using" it for anything, you can opt to get a SMS about that, and choose whether this applies at weekends or overnight. They even plot the rate of "login"/ "logout" events for the modems, both as a whole and mapped onto exchange locations so that you can see if there's a problem beyond just you got unlucky this time.
- donalhunt 6y ago
  Many years ago when I was having cable modem issues, I used to scrape the SNMP off the modem and map stuff like that locally. Was very helpful when diagnosing issues with Level 1 support. "yes... it happens 20 times a day at these times..." Since then the firmware on devices seems to have either dropped those types of features (cost reduction) or restricted them to an ISP-accessible interface ("security"). :(

by kn100 6y ago

tialaramex 6y ago

> I worked at a UK ISP a couple years back and lets just say the 'monitoring' that ISPS have is extremely limited. That's a choice. Presumably a cost conscious choice, not a limit imposed by Openreach. A&A presents each customer with a live updated chart of bandwidth usage, latency, and low-level polling of the DSL modem in the customer's home. If your line drops even if you aren't "using" it for anything, you can opt to get a SMS about that, and choose whether this applies at weekends or overnight. They even plot the rate of "login"/ "logout" events for the modems, both as a whole and mapped onto exchange locations so that you can see if there's a problem beyond just you got unlucky this time.

donalhunt 6y ago
Many years ago when I was having cable modem issues, I used to scrape the SNMP off the modem and map stuff like that locally. Was very helpful when diagnosing issues with Level 1 support. "yes... it happens 20 times a day at these times..." Since then the firmware on devices seems to have either dropped those types of features (cost reduction) or restricted them to an ISP-accessible interface ("security"). :(