Broadband woes

In the last couple of years broadband was nothing but trouble for me. It started with moving from Qwest 1.5Mbps to Speakeasy 6Mbps service in 2005. It cost a fortune (almost $150/month), but for the price it was the only way to get high connection speed AND static IP addresses.

I need static IP because I host my domain, and Exchange server, and web server at home.

It was exorbitantly expensive (you could get cable at 1/3 of the price then, but alas! no static ip). And it worked well - for a while. In the beginning of 2007 I started experiencing massive packet loss during the business hours. The truth is, it is possible that the problem started earlier, and I just noticed it then. Replacing the modem did not help, nor did an onsite visit from a Covad engineer, who found no problems with my home network whatsoever.

I am fairly sure that the problem was actually with the equipment at the office - when they reprovisioned the line, it helped, although temporarily, and when they put the modem in safe mode, it worked well, but only at 4Mbps.

After I lost any hope to resolve this problem with Speakeasy, I moved to Qwest. Qwest promised blazingly fast connection (7Mbps) at half the price of Speakeasy. At for a while, it was true - I never got full 7 megabit of course, but 6 was definitely there - both on DSL speed measuring apps like Speakeasy speed test, as well as on downloads.

However, connectivity deteriorated over the last few months - now I am barely getting 2.5Mbps down. Often the speed falls to 1.5, and it has never ever been above 3.5 in the last 3 months (I checked often).



The modem says that it is connected at 6Mbps, and the line does not show any drops, so I assume the bottleneck is probably an oversubscribed connection to the backbone. Maybe I should just go back to Speakeasy and hope that they've fixed the line...