LOW INTERNET SPEED & SIGNAL BREAKING

[PAUL_TANG]

HI,

IT IS SO SAD, I PURCHASED THE SO CALL " HIGH SPEED INTERNET SERVERCES" AND PAID HUNDREDS OF BUCKS. THIS THING IS SO SLOW.....EVEN OPEN A WEBPAGE TAKES ME MINUTES...AND THE SIGNALS KEEP BREAKING MOST OF THE TIME.... I CALLED VERIZON, TRIED  THIS AND TRIED THAT....TRANSFERED TO A TECH GUY....AND HAD NO IDEA WHAT TO DO....FEEL VERY DISAPPOINTED. CAN SOMEBODY IN VERIZON FIX THIS ?  THANKS!!!!!!

REGARDS!

PAUL

[JohnnyBrook]

I am a Verizon customer, not a representative of the company!   I certainly do feel sympathetic at your obvious frustration, but need to say such few things as I understand about technical history.

The original method of transmitting computer data over phone lines used a "modulator-demodulator," referred to as a "modem."  This device used audio tones to send digital data.  Its action could be heard as chirping, squealing and hissing sounds transmitted as a phone call.  Originally it was viewed as a wonderful advance but by modern standards is unusable due to its slow data speed, I think 300 data bits per second; that's BITS, not megabits (millions of bits) per second.  Painfully slow.

The next advance, which I once used, is DSL (digital subscriber line) service.  This system allows the telephone line to be used for ordinary voice calls while a very high frequency series of pulses is sent down the line, decoded by a small box and fed into your computer.  This, UNFORTUNATELY, is known as "high speed internet."  In my case, my data speed was about 750 thousand bits per second, a big, and indeed high speed, jump over the old squealing modem.  However, even this dramatic increase in speed doesn't really give "high speed" results in curren web browser usage due to the large amounts of data required -- much more than you might think.

Many, but not all, Verizon customers have access to their fiber-optic "FiOS" service.  Depending on the level of FiOS service chosen the speed can be very fast indeed.  When I first started using FiOS my connection ran at 15 mbps (megabits, or millions of bits, per second).  Now I have purchased the service level that delivers 75 mbps, 75 million bits per second, and will often run even faster than that as can be seen with www.speedtest.net.

Note the subtle difference between mbps - megabits per second - and capital "M" Mbps - megaBYTES per second, in which each character such as those typed here takes 8 bits plus a few additiional error-correcting bits to transmit and display.

If you are not in an area where Verizon has installed fiber optic cable you are pretty much stuck with a DSL hookup.  I can't tell exactly what might be wrong with your setup or configuratioin, but even at its best DSL is not a good match for the surprisingly large amounts of data that has to be transmitted to you before a web page will appear.  Photographs and video are a contributor as are, quite often, the many separate advertisements that web pages often contain.  Many of these require separate web connections from various places to fill in the page(s).

Finally, even if you have super fast FiOS service you are still dependant on the performance of the internet as a whole as the data coming to you has to pass through many connections and through servers which may not respond as quickly as they should.

I regret your obvious annoyance and frustration.

[dslr595148]

Step one: Visit http://www.giganews.com/line_info.html and post up the Traceroute the page shows, if you wish. Be aware that your non-bogan public IP Address will show up.  It might shown up as the final hop (bottom-most line of the trace)  might contain a hop with your IP address in it. Either remove that line or show only the first two octets. What I'm looking for is a line that mentions "ERX" in it's name towards the end. If for some reason the trace does not complete (two lines full of Stars), keep the trace route intact.

For example this what I saw when I was using Verizon

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news.giganews.com

    traceroute to 71.242.*.* (71.242.*.*), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
    1 gw1-g-vlan201.dca.giganews.com (216.196.98.4) 13 ms 13 ms 13 ms
    2 ash-bb1-link.telia.net (213.248.70.241) 39 ms 7 ms 7 ms
    3 TenGigE0-2-0-0.GW1.IAD8.ALTER.NET (63.125.125.41) 4 ms 4 ms GigabitEthernet2-0-0.GW8.IAD8.ALTER.NET (63.65.76.189) 4 ms
    4 so-7-1-0-0.PHIL-CORE-RTR1.verizon-gni.net (130.81.20.137) 6 ms 6 ms 6 ms
    5 P3-0-0.PHIL-DSL-RTR11.verizon-gni.net (130.81.13.170) 6 ms 6 ms 6 ms
    6 static-71-242-*-*.phlapa.east.verizon.net (71.242.*.*) 32 ms 32 ms 33 ms

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Step two: Can you provide the Transceiver Statistics from your modem?

#3 If you don't know how to get that info:

a) What is the brand and model of your modem?

b) If you have a RJ-45 WAN port router connected to it: What is the brand and model of the RJ-45 WAN port router?

#4 If you have a RJ-45 WAN port router connected to the modem, even if you know how to get the Transceiver Statistics from the modem: What is the brand and model of the RJ-45 WAN port router?