Since area code 717 DSL outage three days ago - connection is not stable

[blacknblue2]

My DL speed averages around 2800 > 2900. Now it will drop to under 1,000 and ping times go very high. It seems that early morning the DSL is at its most stable state and the afternoon is the worst state. Unlike cable DSL isn't supposed to have lag due to high use. So what is going on with Verison DSL in my part of the world? I just looked at my records. For four years I've had Verizon DSL and have this problem about twice a year. Each time I must start by calling the tech people who go through their mundane talking sheet; what is your OS; have you rebooted your computer; have you rebooted the modem, etc. It is a waste of my time because the problem has never, ever, never been on my end. Verizon could go a long way in advancing customer support satisfaction through having local support. To me, the biggest selling point for switching to cable is that the support center is local, five miles away. The biggest frustration with Verizon is the location of their tech customer call centers. I always dread calling the Verizon tech support center or is that part of the business plan?

[smith6612]

If this happened immediately after an outage, it sounds like something was damaged (perhaps a fiber cable, it happens all the time from construction and things hitting the cables) and it isn't performing as it should, or Verizon is using a slower, less capable link as a backup. You're going to need to get someone to look at the problem regardless. Talk to the guys at Verizon Direct over at DSLReports and have them see what they can do. They're typically good at solving these issues.

As far as the Call Centers go, Outsourcing and not training agents on how to diagnose network troubles is often a cost cutting avenue. It has it's benefits but then there's also the many downsides it includes.

[blacknblue2]

Two days ago I did get the DSLreport direct people started on the problem. Not sure who or what they did but my speed seems to be more stable. I am running line monitoring and smokeping at DSL reports. SO far everyday around 4PM graphs show that things start getting bad. Pings spike sky high. I didn't think DSL was supposed to have the same congestion problems as do the cable connections?

[smith6612]

It won't have congestion when it comes down to the physical design of the network. What is between you and Verizon can only be congested by you, unlike a Cable connection where you essentially have a "single" run of Coaxial cabling being ran to some number of homes. Once you're on the part of Verizon's network where traffic aggregates (The DSLAM, Core network, edge network, backbone) which would be the CMTS on a Cable system, that is where the factors of sharing come into play with any form of connection. It's unavoidable. The problems people see with DSL come down to the shared points of any Internet connection, and in this case typically ATM Circuits on Verizon's end of things leading to the backbone.

[blacknblue2]

I forgot to add this....even though my speed is back up, streaming audio isn't working well. It will start but eventually it will cut out. All stations do it; different browsers do it and it does it with anti-virus disabled. I have to reload and then it will work again for a while. I believe I get cut off because of a high ping and/or packet loss.   The DSL smokeping test shows that over the past 30 hours my average packet loss is .84% to a maximum of 98.04%. 

[blacknblue2]

Eleven months ago they put me on another DSLAM and re-provisioned me.  It worked great until about two weeks ago I started to notice that things were not going as well as they had been going.  Then came the big outage and things have never gone back to the great that it once was.