Category Archives: General

Plusnet Failures

Posted on by
Reply

My mother, an octogenarian living alone in the UK, has been without her home phone service and internet service for 9 days now. Her mobile phone barely works at home due to lack of signal (something that mystifies me, but is a topic for a different post). Plusnet provides both her landline and her broadband, which are critical for somebody of that age in case of an emergency. Yet they are doing nothing to fix the issue.

The first challenge was actually getting this reported to them. They do not have an online form for submitting problem reports. Instead, their website literally says that to report a problem with your phone service you should call them. No joke.

Eventually, my mother managed to get through to them from her mobile, finding a place in the house where it was able to connect. They filed that in their system at 7:11pm on November 1, and simply said they had reported it to their “suppliers” to investigate.

Continue reading →

BenefitWallet: Customer Service At Its Worst

Posted on by
1

The HR service my new employer uses, JustWorks, does not, it seems, partner with the best service companies. Our health insurance is with Aetna, and is awful by comparison with other plans. The dental and vision benefits are also through Aetna, and worse than the more common plans I’ve had previously.

All of that is nothing compared to BenefitsWallet though. JustWorks are using BenefitsWallet to provide the FSA and HSA options. They sent me information to sign up in the middle of June, and again on July 1. I was traveling however, and only got around to it trying to sign up this evening.

Continue reading →

Protecting Personal Information

Posted on by
Reply

Do you know what personal information it is important to protect? Have you ever thought about what could happen if people manage to piece together the various bits of information about you that are stored in various databases or filing cabinets to create a more complete picture?

More specifically, most people in the US know not to share their Social Security Number with people at random. How about your driver’s license number, or state ID card number? Your passport number?

Continue reading →

Scooter Shares in Alameda

Posted on by
Reply

I received an email over the weekend from Bird, one of the companies behind electric scooter sharing here in the SF area stating the following:

The City of Alameda will consider banning shared electric scooters at a City Council hearing on December 4th at 7:00 p.m. at City Hall! Let’s remind city leaders that Alameda residents want access to affordable, environmentally-friendly options such as Bird in their city. 

The backlash against these scooters in San Francisco came as a surprise in a city that claims to be progressive, and it was disappointing to see the city ban them, then decide to run small scale trials of them with different companies from the two who pioneered the service, and in limited numbers. To see Alameda follow this crazy, illogical path is even more depressing.

Continue reading →

Books to Read Whenever

Posted on by
Reply

I was shared a link to an article with the title “33 books everyone should read before turning 30” and, aside from being more than a few years too late, most of the books on the list didn’t appeal to me whatsoever. The only one I have read, I wouldn’t necessarily include on a list of must read books.

It got me thinking though, what books would I recommend people read, whenever? My list is nowhere near as long (just 8 books, and some authors I like to read).

Continue reading →

UPS: More Excuses, Less Deliveries

Posted on by
Reply

[Updated November 21, 2017; see below]

Back in August 2016 I wrote about UPS and the repeated delivery failures I was seeing. Things have not really improved this year at all. My most recent UPS failure was a tablet ordered for work that we needed quickly, so I paid extra to get 1-day shipping (ordering on a Friday with a delivery expected on Monday).

Continue reading →

Common Networks

Posted on by
1

Those who have been following along here (or on Twitter) might recall all the strange issues we were having with Comcast’s internet service, specifically abysmal performance during the late evenings. For most of that time, and it was over a year I was trying to get them to fix the issue, they were sadly the only option we had for internet access. They had previously priced our city owned cable TV & ISP out of business, and then bought the customers. While that was happening, AT&T decided to simply drop out of providing internet service to the almost 500 homes in our neighborhood.

Then one day a friend posted information about a new wireless ISP starting up here in Alameda: Common Networks. I signed up to be on their waiting list immediately. Not long afterwards I was surprised by the email requesting information & selection of a date to install. They were still in beta at the time and suggested I keep Comcast as a backup for a little while, but with just one brief outage in the first two months they were easily more reliable than Comcast. Not to mention being faster. Here’s a speed test result from my phone:

Latterly with Comcast I was paying the same as Common charges, but getting max 25Mbps down and 5Mbps up.

Continue reading →

Comcast: Back to the House

Posted on by
Reply

Amazingly, despite overwhelming amounts of data from myself, and data from people in Oakland, San Francisco and Santa Clara all commenting that their network sees the same issues around the same time of day (late evenings), once again I get a call from Comcast saying they want to come out to my house and attach things to the network here. They truly are fixated with the modem & the cable part of their network. And yet they cannot explain how something in my house could:

  1. Affect me only for bursts of time in the late evening, but be fine most of the rest of the time
  2. Affect other people here, and in various other cities in the bay area

Apparently, they just cannot see that this is probably impacting many of their customers. I have spoken to many here who see the issue but don’t have the patience to deal with Comcast’s totally abysmal customer support system. Even when it gets escalated, it appears they cannot get past it being localized to one house.

If they don’t want to look at the data in their routers, perhaps they should try calling some of their customers in the bay area and asking whether they use the network in the late evening regularly, and whether they have seen any issues with it.

Here’s the latest data I sent them:

January 16, 2017 (averaging 37% packet loss in the test):

January 17, 2017 (averaging 18% packet loss in the test):

Also from January 17, the trace showing losses at Sunnyvale again, and from nodes beyond it (likely dropped at Sunnyvale too – something they’ve always said was not happening):

I get it that their network can get loaded; I work in an industry that sees how much data traffic increases month on month as people use more and more high bandwidth services. But Comcast’s only role here is to provide the pipe to the Internet and keep it from being overloaded. I get it that there are huge swings in traffic volume across a 24 hour period; I don’t necessarily expect to see the full bandwidth during peak hours (right now, at 11am on a weekday, for reference, I am seeing about 30Mbps), but dropping to under 1Mbps is unacceptable. And the times when the packet losses are so great that my router decides the Internet is inaccessible are completely unacceptable. Personally, I would say once it drops below 50% of the bandwidth I’m paying for, that is a problem; I suspect they have a lower percentage in mind, but I doubt it is as low as 1%. If they do consider 1% of the contract bandwidth to be acceptable, perhaps the FCC should take a closer look at the service Comcast provides.

Comcast: Now It’s The Wi-Fi

Posted on by
Reply

Last Thursday I spent almost 2 hours on the phone with a couple of engineers from Comcast. The one who lead the call was sitting in the Hayward head end location, connected to the same network I was using (I’m not sure where the other one was physically located – he was dialed into the call). Around 10pm, we both started to see “anomolies” in the Speedtest results. As well seeing packet loss in the traceroute results from the Sunnyvale router. We also saw longer than typical ping times to Google (normally low tens of milliseconds from my home).

He tried a number of things, but nothing made a difference. Until, at 10:20pm, it rapidly went back to being normal. The pings improved. The Speedtest results improved. The traceroutes started showing responses from Sunnyvale again (and by 10:30pm they were also consistently good times). Unfortunately, it didn’t go bad again that night while we were on the phone, but I was hopeful that having had two of their engineers see what I was seeing there might be a light at the end of the tunnel. I should have known better.

Wi-Fi

During that call there was a question about how I was connected to the network, and we even switched my computer between the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands on my Wi-Fi to verify that made no difference. It did not. Where I live, both bands are pretty clear of interference. Normally I have the two bands using the same SSID, but during the call I switched the configuration so they were separated (allowing me to easily switch between them).

I did also point out at the time that it was somewhat irrelevant since I had seen and documented the problem in many configurations, from many devices, including some of my neighbors homes and even some friends in other bay area locations.

To be clear here, I have seen the problem:

  • On Wi-Fi connected computers (both bands)
  • On Wi-Fi connected mobile devices (both bands)
  • On ethernet connected computers through my router
  • On ethernet connected computers direct to a Comcast-provided modem
  • On both our wired and wireless Roku boxes

Additionally, at other times in the day there is no problem at all from the same computer I was using during the call. Here is a speed test from that same computer taken around 6:45pm this evening, while we were streaming HD video from Netflix on the Roku and a visitor was watching a basketball game on his Mac. As I’ve made clear throughout this, outside of the 10pm to midnight (some days a little later) window, the performance is very acceptable.

That was run from the browser on my Mac Mini connecting to the internet over the same Wi-Fi network. The only difference was I ran it at 6:45pm rather than 10pm.

Home Visit

So, today’s call from the engineering team did not go well. Firstly, even though I saw the slow down over the weekend and yesterday (I was not online at the right times on Sunday or Monday), apparently the equipment in the Hayward location saw none of it.

Furthermore, he now believes that the “anomalies” seen in the Speedtest results during our call last week were related to Adobe Flash and not the network. While I am not going to defend Flash at all, I will say that Speedtest is rock solid, and the versions I am running are not Flash based, so that doesn’t apply to my results.

Finally, it was suggested that perhaps the issue is in my Wi-Fi network and they should come to my house to check the setup in the house. Really. I am not kidding. Once again they are concluding that their network is fine and any issue must be in my house.

When I pointed out that several of their engineers have already been here, and perhaps he should just pick the phone up and call one of them, I was told that they would need to come out to see it themselves. I guess they don’t trust any of their colleagues to check the modem and signal quality.

Once again, Comcast folks, if you believe that something in my house is the cause of this, please explain to me how so many of my neighbours see the same issue. Is my Apple Airport Extreme somehow managing to interfere with them all?

Also, I’m willing to accept that the packet losses in Sunnyvale are coincidence, if you can show me what else in your network could cause so many people in this area to see this issue. And why they correspond so well in terms of time to when the network quality is poor. Right now, when the network is working well, I see this from my traces:

5 be-33651-cr01.sunnyvale.ca.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.90.93) 11.224 ms 16.193 ms 13.003 ms

The only time I see slower ping times or no responses from that node is when all the other things I try are bad too. What are those other things? Well, here’s a list of the things we often see when it is behaving poorly:

  • Web pages, Facebook content, Twitter content and emails not loading;
  • Netflix and Amazon Prime video not being able to load their index screens;
  • If we have the index loaded, Netflix and Amazon not being able to start playing videos;
  • Videos that are playing keep pausing to load, which can take many minutes to recover from, and in many cases times out;
  • Speedtest shows results under 1Mbps for download (compare to the speed above when it is working)

Experience

What I haven’t mentioned to Comcast until today is that I have a little bit more knowledge about Wi-Fi than perhaps their regular customer. Having been working in a Wi-Fi software company since 2003, and even been part of the creation of some of the Wi-Fi standards, I think I am pretty well placed to know whether my Wi-Fi setup here is likely to be the cause.

I have spent perhaps too much time inside shielded rooms helping access point manufacturers fine tune their software to squeeze the maxiumum performance from their Wi-Fi stacks. I am well aware that the 802.11ac system I have here far exceeds the capabilities of the Comcast network it connects to for Internet access.

I have spent too much time connecting to Wi-Fi networks all over the world and running performance tests on them (my wife is regularly upset by me searching for public Wi-Fi to use and test when we are out).

Tonight

Of couse, tonight I didn’t see any issue while I was reading on my iPad (normally I will encounter a period of time when media in particular doesn’t load), and my timed download script didn’t see anything either tonight.

Comcast: Still Fixated by the Modem

Posted on by
Reply

Last week’s email to the CEO’s office generated some communication again. On Friday afternoon, I received a call from a lady in their Executive Customer Relations department letting me know that she had reached out to the engineering team the day before, but still had not heard anything back from them.

Earlier today I got another call from her, relaying their answer: that they had installed a parallel modem in the house and then paid for a replacement modem, and that had exhausted their options. I kid you not. Finally, moments ago I received this in a DM from the Twitter support folks, relaying questions from, I assume, the same engineering team:

Good morning. The engineering team is asking if you see the same results with a wired test during the times shown in the screenshots. They also noted that there are no events shown in the node history corresponding with the dates and times pointed out. They also wanted to know if you changed the location of your modem at all recently. Thank you. -FL

Despite everything they’ve been sent, and the fact that the entire recent discussion was initiated by my frustration that they cannot see anything past the cable modem, they are still fixated on it being a modem problem.

So, given this fixation with the modem, here are my questions back to them:

Dear Comcast Engineering,

There is more to your network than the cable modems & headends. In fact, in the grand scheme of things, that link is pretty short. But given your fixation on the modem, and the wiring in my house, despite several of your techs agreeing that it all seems to be just fine, here are my questions to you:

1. Please explain how my modem here in one house in Alameda can be causing packet loss at the 5th hop of the trace, and only that hop (which has been a reliable symptom of this since I first reported it, despite all the modem swaps). Note: that router is located ~45 miles away in Sunnyvale assuming your hostnames are accurate (the node is 68.86.90.93, which, according to DNS corresponds to be-33651-cr01.sunnyvale.ca.ibone.comcast.net); it is neither in my house, nor at the end of the wire my modem is connected to.

2. Additionally, please explain how my modem can also be impacting all the other people in Alameda and Oakland who have so far commented on my Nextdoor and Facebook threads sharing the blog post last week confirming they too see the issue with the internet becoming unusable for periods of time during the late evening.

3. Finally, please include in your explanation how this happens only in the late evening, and at other times the same modem, same wiring and same devices are able to get 50 Mbps download speeds reliably.

Thanks in advance,
John