FCC stardards for DSL

The wall of text in my previous post seems to have scared everyone off, so I will make this shorter.

Are there any U.S. Federal minimum standards that an ISP must comply with? (i.e. QoS, packer delay variation, etc.)

My ISP is not in a hurry to discuss my poor service and the option of going somewhere else is not there.

 

You are going to run into a few issues here. One is what your contract states. You signed up for a service, they agreed to provide it. But exactly what that service is going to do is in the contract. I didn't see anything within the FCC that says they have to provide you with X% reliability or service but there likely is help if they are violating their contract.

I'm sure you've seen the page already at http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/broadbandspeed/ . They have an email address for consumers that they promise to answer within 2 days. They have been hit or miss with me. I've emailed them twice. One answer was intelligent and satisfactory. A further inquiring on the subject got me a scripted answer. (It was concerning cellular phones)

Since it is a utility, is under federal regulation and you are in Alaska, you do have the option of going a step further. The reason I point out Alaska is because there are inherent physical difficulties with living there and asking elected officials for help in Alaska will get you farther than just about anywhere else. Choices are limited in Alaska for many things. So are people. They want you to stay!!!

It's going to depend on how far you want to take this. Ask for a senior person at the ISP (hopefully the office is also in Alaska?) or see if you can emails of several senior people there and cc them. Nicely and professionally.

Next would be the FCC

If that doesn't yield anything useful, you may ask your senator's office for help. Not the governor or any other state rep, you want someone with a federal office.

You have presented enough technical information to go over most service reps heads and i would guess quite a few field technicians as well. You are going to need a senior technician or a senior rep of the company to have any ideas about the issue. I think some of what you see as no hurry to fix it is that they don't know what to make of what you've told them. You've likely lost them all less than half way through.

 

Thanks to both of you for the reply. Sorry for being so late getting back to you.

I pushed the issue numerous times at the ISP Tech Support desk until I finally received a call from the manager. I was told that, because of where I am located, they simply cannot provide low latency at 1 meg speed. (The manager said this is what his field tech told him.) I was told my options were A) reduce my bandwidth to 320k d/l or B) live with the intermittant latency spikes.

Since the most frequent high latency times are also during the commonly expected high residential consumer times (evening and weekends) I am left to assume that the ISP's hardware is being overburdened during peak times and leading to my latency spikes. The Manger denied that it had anything to to with the other local users, but could not provide me with a 'why'. The Manager told my he would call back with the technical reason that I can't get low latency 24/7, but so far the phone has not rang.

Anyone have thoughts on this? It is possible what I am being told is true?

Thanks in advance

 

Your other post (which I can't find anymore) suggested that you use ACS as your ISP and that you were experiencing issues with online gaming, particularly WoW. Also the latency has only started recently, around the last month or so?

I also have ACS as my ISP and in late December/early January (can't really remember) the latency when playing WoW has gone from mild increase to unplayable during peak hours. I thought it was a overburdened connection since it only happens during peak hours, but the latency continues until midnight every night. That's a bit late for peak hours for every night. Also, the latency is bad, but you can at least log in to the game before midnight. This seemed a bit suspicious.

I called up the office and complained about latency and talked to a technician about it finding no problem with home connection. The technician commented on others seeing the same latency at the same times and figured it was a congestion problem and mentioned that games were supposed to be prioritized on the network. That got me thinking that maybe the packets were being shaped somehow.

A friend has a GCI connection in the same neighborhood with little latency in WoW, so I did some testing with his connection. tracerts from ACS to battle.net results in going through ACS networks, Level3 networks, and ATT networks. GCI to battle.net results in GCI, Level3, and ATT. If there is a problem it's on ACS networks.

Next I did a tracert from my ACS connection to my friends GCI connection. I found that the packets go from my community to ae1-0-r1.nwc.acsalaska.net (I assume somewhere in Anchorage) then back through GCI to my community. I threw together an old box and made it an SSH server I could tunnel through and set it up at my friends house. Connecting through the SSH server WoW had a little bit more latency due to doubling back a bit, but it played as if it were not during peak hours during peak hours.

When connecting through ACS it seemed like the packets were getting "lost" when playing certain games (particularly WoW, Halo, other popular titles), resulting in a huge amount of latency and disconnects. But I wouldn't see a large drop in packets from other traffic like VoIP. Pings would get worse during peak hours (made sense since they're low priority) but wouldn't get lost. Playing through the SSH tunnel I played fine and did not experience the drastic latency that had recently appeared. This leads me to believe that they might have changed the priority of traffic that WoW uses to low rather than high like they might have wanted to do.

Maybe do some testing along these lines and try getting back to the manager once you get a little more info. I recently tried to get a hold of someone who would know anything about how different traffic is prioritized on the network for a few days to discuss my findings but the local office has no idea who to contact about this.

Sorry about the length! But hopefully we can get ACS to do something about their service with a bit more info and pushing them to make a few changes.

 

Thanks for your comments Squirrelsage; sorry for the delayed reply - I braved the world of theme parks in Orlando and am just getting back into the swing of things.

I do use ACS for ISP and the latency issues are most noticable when playing WoW. However they are also noticable during streaming applications like netflx and youtube.

I had also wondered if this was a packet shaping or priority QoS issue that ACS just didn't want to comment on. However after my recent testing, I don't think that is my issue. I have family in the same community that use ACS (only thing available here) and also play WoW. Their tracert results show a perfectly low and steady ping 24 hours a day. My latency fluctuations appear to be caused during the "last mile".

It has now been over two weeks since I was told there would be a "call back" from the ACS Manager. I will now resume calling him on a regular basis until I get further information and will post anything further in case it can help your problems.

 

After a couple of reminders that it had been weeks since I was told I would get a call back, I finally received a call back from the ACS Tech Department Head. He said ACS has an "equipment problem" in my area that is causing the latency fluctuations during peak demand. He did not go into detail, so unless I learn something different, I am reading this as "insufficient equipment" instead of "problem equipment". He claims the "problem" is scheduled for repair, but the absolute soonest would be the end of this coming summer. I was again told that my latency would be stable if I reduced my bandwidth from 1Mbps to 320Kbps; that is the only thing that can be done. I was also offered a credit for the service that I have payed for but has not been reliably available.

It has been partially satisfying to finally receive an admittance of fault from the ISP. Even though I feel that I did most of the research and legwork, at least now I will stop wondering if maybe it's some wiring/equipment issue that I could fix on my end. The offer of a credit was certanily nice, but the cost is not of a concern to me.

If another ISP option was available, I would be switching today, as I beleive my problem exists simply because the ISP is in no rush to upgrade their equipment even after overselling their capacity.

That's life I suppose. The cost of living in a small town and a small neighorhood.