Last year at this time were were seeing a lot of issues with Fairpoint's dsl service. Looks like we're in for another bout of problems this spring.
Things had been working pretty well since last spring but a few weeks ago we started seeing momentary outages of 20 seconds or so. We remained connected to fairpoint but could only get as far as our gateway. Other times we would get as far as their peering point with alter.net. No latency issues or packet loss. Just nothing moving for 20 seconds. This would make a web page slow to load once in a while but was very bad for gaming, streaming and terminal sessions.
On the 16th they experienced a "routing issue" that lasted from 1AM or so until 9 or 10 AM that effected customers with static addresses. Complete outage, nothing moving past the gateway.
Since that time the outages have become more frequent and longer in duration. Now we seen them a half dozen times an hour and they last for 45 to 60 seconds. Same last hops, either the gateway or alter.net.
Called support and was informed that the problem that occurred on the 16th has not been resolved as yet and they have no estimate for resolution. He characterized it as occasional slowness. This might be true from the perspective of web browsing but not from the perspective of streaming, terminal sessions or gaming - for these types protocols they are hard breaks.
Also seeing some last packets now that we weren't before. Its been as high as 10% at times. Latency hasn't been a particular issue.
He took the obligatory notes and opened an up steam ticket and we should get a call after they check things or if they need to come tot he site - hoping they don't put some poor repair guy through that because its pretty obviously not a last mile problem.
Seeing the other threads re fairpoint that are on here right now I would hazard a guess that they are having capacity issues again. You would hope that they would be a bit more proactive and keep capacity ahead of the usage curve by a reasonable margin.
( For last years issues see »
Fairpoint and ALTER.NET peering )