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Epoche
join:2008-10-12
Williston, SC

Epoche

Member

Feed hit by lightning?

This could be a long story...

So, I've had Atlantic Broadband for well over a year now. I used to have Roadrunnner when I lived in the big city, so i'm pretty familiar with cable internet. I also build my own computers and setup all of my own stuff, so I know a bit about it. I should also note that i'm an online gamer, too, and that that is the main use of my internet.

I have run online bandwidth tests on both Atlantic and Roadrunner regularly to test my bandwidth, (usually at PC Pitstop or Speakeasy, and more recently at the Atlanticbb site.) and in all of those previous tests the speed needle and progress bar were always smooth.

It was always smooth on my Atlantic connection until, oh, I don't know... 8 or 9 months ago? I got online one day and realized that I could not stream a Google video. I then ran a bandwidth test and my speeds were atrocious, not to mention the speed needle and progress bar of said test was bouncing and hopping all over the place.

I called Atlantic and scheduled an appointment. When the guy came out he tested everything from the box at the house to my computer and determined that everything inside was fine. He then removed the cable (that is the underground feed to my house) and said it had been hit by lightning. He showed me that it was black and burnt at the end of the wire. He replaced the end and said he'd have to replace the other end (which would help matters for the time being) and schedule a sub-contracting team to come out and replace the underground wire - that this could take a week for them to get here. He said he would go find the box and replace the other end of my cable, for now. He then left, apparently could not find the box for the other end of the cable and just kept on driving. :/

I tried to be patient for that week, waiting for them to replace my cable, when it dawned on me that the guy may not have even scheduled the appointment for me. So, I called Atlantic again to check on it. Sure enough, the guy never told anyone to come and replace anything. The service rep. told me that a supervisor would be contacting me on my cell phone.

Well, instead of a supervisor contacting me, they sent a tech, who lived near me, to my house at 8am without warning to test if the cable "really" needed replacing. He found the box and replaced the other end that the first guy neglected to do (he told me that it had not been replaced by the first tech.) And then ran some tests and told me the the packet loss I had was acceptable and basically tried to convince me that there was nothing at all wrong with my internet. Never heard from any supervisor.

By this time i'm really getting tired of calling, (I have social anxiety, also, which isn't help this matter) when one night my internet starts getting real bad and I decide to call and complain. I tell this entire story again for like the 10th time and, as always, with each call the person seems to care and seems like it's finally going to get fixed, but always ends with them saying they can't see what's wrong. Some tech tells me that he is going to monitor my line and see if he see the problem... Never hear from them again about it.

Finally I decide that i'll downgrade my plan and pay less money, so I have that done and it went from 5.8 down 500 up to like 700 down 100 up or something crazy slow like that (I can't really remember the exact speed) I call back to have it reinstated at which point I tell the girl why I had downgraded to begin with and explain this long story yet again, sigh. She tells me that she will make the appointment to have someone come and replace the underground wire asap. She gives me an all day appointment, 8 to 8. I say, "It's that easy, huh? And you have the authority to do that?" And she says, "Yep". I ask her why no one did that before, if it was so easy and they had the authority to do it. And then reassures me that when someone sees this order they are going to wonder why no one fixed my internet and that someone will be held accountable for this. She apologizes and states how she wants to get this resolved for me. I tell her i've heard that on every call for months now, i'll believe it when I see it.

Well, I take off work cause I think they'll be at my house all day digging up the yard and such. Boy, was I wrong. They arrived well after 5pm when the workday was over and had no clue why they were at my house. And no one had ever planned to replace my underground cable to begin with.

Instead, they looked for problems in my house and with my own equipment. They couldn't notice the erratic bandwidth tests, complete with bouncing needle and hopping progress ball... because, by replacing the two ends of my cable they've effectively covered-up the problem so that it's barely recognizable - and probably only recognizable to a gamer. They also admitted that they don't even do any tests that test for how smooth my information flows through the cable.

So, they ran around my house, replacing splitters and unhooking cables to rooms that had no TV's, saying that cellphone waves can come into the line and cause interference or something like that. Nothing helped. The guy said he had some tool that could check my underground cable, but that he did not have it on him at the moment, and would return later to test and replace my wire if needed.

I received a call the next day or so from him where he rambled on about talking with his supervisor about something or other and that they can't find the problem (I told him because they had covered it up by replacing the ends of my wires)Never did come and check with the tool he said he had, and I finally told him to do whatever they wanted. I was tired of dealing with it.

I have missed work, more than once, talked to countless people on the phone, repeating this story 20 times, done lots of monitoring myself - basically i've put in lots of time and labor for something I don't get paid for and shouldn't have to do, while the time and money they have spent sending techs out to my house and trying to convince me that my cable is fine, they could have just replaced the cable and been done with it.

So, if I do a bandwidth test online the needle bounces some and the progress ball hops a bit, and this can become much worse at different times of the day and if I have several things using internet bandwidth, it gets worse.

If I play games that are fast, like shooting guns, flying planes or racing cars, it gets choppy at times, especially near other players, sometimes rubberbanding. It's less noticeable on slower games like RPGs, so i'm pretty much relegated to playing those if I want a virtually lag-free experience - or at least one where no one really cares if your character hopped across the room a bit, but people tend to get mad if you are hopping around in a FPS (first-person-shooter) game, and your character never seems to be where they saw it - they think you are cheating.

If I run a ping test to Atlanticbb.net the normal ping seems to be around 15ms, but can be seen to jump to 30+ in spurts, and, when streaming some music and a couple of videos or something while running the ping test the ping can spike to over 300ms - that's like dial-up latency.

---Looks like this one I did to Yahoo while streaming a couple of videos on Google or something---

Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=223ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=286ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=216ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=33ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=34ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=32ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=33ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=33ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=34ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=32ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=60ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=33ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=58ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=32ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=33ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=33ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=34ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=40ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=86ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=118ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=129ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=133ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=137ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=112ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=123ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=126ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=110ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=109ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=111ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=54ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=110ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=218ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=216ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=33ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=221ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=230ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=265ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=218ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=161ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=260ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=254ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=262ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=284ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=224ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=34ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=34ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=33ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=32ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=33ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=52ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=33ms TTL=48
Reply from 206.190.60.37: bytes=32 time=42ms TTL=48

Anyhow, i'm lost on this. And it is my only choice for non-dial-up, I think. I suppose i'll have to physically walk into some office somewhere and act like an A-hole to get them to fix my cable. I need to see if the phone company has DSL out here yet and be done with this problem.

The last tech told me that lightning can hit the pine trees and run down the roots and hop into the underground cable, since I wondered how it could even get hit by lightning.

Has anyone here had a cable hit by lightning? Did you have a similar experience in terms of performance and lag?