Suddenlink → Suddenlink Good Speeds Bad Consistency

Hi Im new here but am completely at a loss. For the past 2 months gaming online has been horrible. I run a local computer shop but only do service calls. anyway this puts me in direct contact with suddenlink quite a lot. some of my customers when i do a suddenlink speedtest have the proper download speed and upload speed but the consistency of service will range from 20 to 85. this makes gaming and phone not work right. other customers will receive 99 on consistency every time. i have spent 8 hours with suddenlink yesterday while they attempted to fix this at one of my customers house. We have had to actually go into the local suddenlink office and talked to jerry and dave because of this issue. so they send out a tech supervisor who has been with the company for 20 years and they worked on the issue. swapping out the mta for different modems and running new lines straight from the pole. Now when they came out they spotted something that none of the other 3 techs did which was a taped up section of hardline a little above eye level on the pole. apparently someone damaged the hardline and just taped it up. so first they repaired that but that did not fix it. then they ran the new lines and that didnt fix it. the problem persisted. Laptops were tried and other stuff yet the problem persisted. at my own house i have the same problem. so do my neighbors. it seems there are pockets of this area where people have a 99 on consistency and pockets where people have bad consistency.. My wires were all replaced also. they have recently done the upgrades on speed so everybody does have faster speeds. Now the supervisor who was working decide to go and start at the node and test the consistency. Coming out of the node the consistency was at 93 and as he got closer to the house it fell to 75 and lower. he said he talked to some engineers but they had no solutions either. nobody knows why this is. but it seems to me that the consistency should be 99 coming out of the node and not falling at all. if its coming out of the node at 93 then the problem is starting there and gets worse as it goes. I could be wrong just trying to think logically with what little i know about these things. Does anyone else here have any clue or has seen this before? Thank You for listening and responding!
Oh Yeah if a a query of the modem is performed they find that there are a lot of insertions and packet loss if that helps any. And most customers would not recognize they have a problem unless they are doing things that require a constant data stream. Like gaming or bieng a DJ or something of that nature. they might notice some slowness in websites loading but they would probably chock that up to computer problems. However this is not bieng caused by any viruses running in the background or anything of that nature. the same laptop i use at other place was also used to test a new drop today and the cinsistency stayed at 99 everytime i tested it. and this was clear out state route 26 which is in the country around here.

It sounds like you have everyone on it at the local level. It sounds to me like they are unable to fix your problems, so you need to escalate up the chain of command, until you find someone who can fix the issue.

You might want to start off by making an account here on dslreports.com and then you will want to post where you are in the world, and maybe show these "consistency of service" numbers you are talking about.

Get as much info as you can here in the forums.

Then I would advise you to contact Pete Abel here on the site by using this link: »Pete Abel and explaining to him what has been going on, and direct him here to this thread.

Keep us posted, and good luck.

I wanted to add something. They also swapped out my docsis 2.0 for a docsis 3.0. And today they ran a new drop to my house. However the problem persists. They changed the cable at 5 pm and at midnight I decided to call and have them query the modem to see what was logged there. There were no packet loss and no insertions and signal levels were great. So why the problem persist is beyond me and why the pulse network isnt detecting that there are consistency problems I dont know. I do know that I have no clue what the problem is and I dont beleive any tech at all would know and basically this just sucks. Its the not knowing what the problem is thats the worst though. Anyway thanks again and maybe someone who has seen this issue before might have an answer.

The location is marietta and belpre ohio and parkersburg wv. I will take some pictures however I am not sure what good that would do but I will take them nonetheless and post them.
Anyway I am not sure why one of my posts didnt get added but they swapped out my drop today around 5 pm and about midnight I called tech support so they could query my modem and according to the pulse network I have great signal levels and no packet loss. But the problem persists.
It will take time for me to gather pictures and such but if anyone knows what the problem might be or has a theory I would love to hear it so that perhaps I can maybe get one of the local guys to read it.
I do have another theory myself. Which would kinda suck because chances are it may never be fixed is that from the storms tree limbs and such might have caused nicks in the hardlines in various places that wouldnt be noticeable withoit doing a physical look at every bit of hardline from the drop to ...well basically everywhere.

Can you do a traceroute to the test server?

Although its a suddenlink provided test, its possible your tests are having to go off net to get to this particular test site.

what would i need to know to do a traceroute to their server? I figure the ip address but how do i get that?

Whatever you type into the address bar to get to the site should be fine, like speedtest.wv.suddenlink.net

I use a program called pingplotter to post my traceroutes.

Here is the traceroute. this is from pingplotter. I am not sure how to look at it really but here it is. Also thank you for your help! it is reall appreciated!

Strange that the destination is unreachable.

Is that the actual site you are using to do your tests, or did you trace to that address because thats the example I gave.

Those traces otherwise look pretty normal.

that is the actual site i go to to do my speedtests. its suddenlink so i prefer to do that than speedtest.net. it is the site i do my tests. it just also happened to be the example you gave. is there any thing else odd about the numbers. multiple traceroutes produce highly fluctuating numbers.

here is one more

and this is the last one

They look pretty normal, except for the last one you posted.

I just realized I also can't traceroute to the test site, so it must be blocked.

Have you ever used the site pingtest.net ? It can be useful for keeping a history of your pings to different sites on the net.

The only thing that comes to mind at this point, is some type of noise event that is taking place on the cable system, or some other interference. I'd think if it were say, a hardline issue, it would be going on all the time, unless it is weather related, like when it gets hot the line stretches and then contracts as the day cools.

From reading your posts, it seems like everything on your end that can be done has been done.

At this point I don't know what else to recommend, maybe someone else will chime in.

thank you for the help you have given me. Hopefully someone sees this and says hey i know that answer. anyway ill keep doing what i always do. plugging away at it. thank you

I've ran that myspeed speedtest of Suddenlink's and the one on Visualware's site and it is showing my "consistency" is always 50-60%. However, doing real testing I am seeing full download/upload speeds, no packet-loss, no abnormal latency, and most importantly, I am having no problems gaming or doing anything else I want to do. Everything is squeaky clean in regards to my connection.

To be honest, I dont have any faith in any version of any speedtest server. I rarely see good speeds on any of them but I can max out my connection with REAL file transfers all day every day.

RichardM, let's focus on the real problem. You said gaming and phone are not working right. Please download PingPlotter standard and run traces @ 1 second intervals to a gaming server that you can reproduce the problem to and post the screenshots of it WHILE IT IS HAPPENING. Look for high latency, packet-loss, and Jitter. Find an example of the problem that you can reproduce and let's troubleshoot it.

Second, what phone service are you using? Is it Suddenlink's or a 3rd party's? If it's a 3rd party voip and if you run anything else on that connection that potentially can reach the limit of your modem's contract, then you MUST use QOS to prevent your network from utilizing all of the modem's capacity otherwise phone is likely to be impacted and ISP's do not support 3rd party voip much less apply QOS for it.

I have internet only. No tv no phone just internet. I also can max out my speed all day every day. suddenlinks speedtest is accurate because i have done thousands at different locations. As far as i can tell whenever there has been a problem, the suddenlink speedtest reflected that problem and when the problem has been fixed by the techs then the suddenlink speedtest has also reflected that. the tests i have conducted on my own connection over the years has always had a consistency of 99 and everything has ran fine. When the problem started to occur the suddenlink speedtest also started to change. My consistency is not always 61. It ranges between 20 and 85 quite a lot.
That being said, A customer of mine has everything suddenlink has to offer. All the tv, internet and phone. He has played wgt(world golf tour) for a long time. his problem began to occur around the same time mine has. He cant talk on his phone. He cannot play his game anymore because of high ping times. He is level 95 or 96. The reason i have told you his level is so that you can see how long he has been playing. and up until the past 2 months or so he was able to play.
I run a minecraft server for my kids and some of their friends. I myself do not play games so there is no outside server unless hamachi is considered that. but also i have a fresh install of windows 7. as an example, it takes google voice 2 minutes to load, netvibes takes 2 minutes to load hotmail takes forever and may not load until a refresh. this cant possibly be a particular website issue because it is more than just me experiencing this issue. My consistency wildly fluctuates. My neighbor next door runs a dj business and his problems also started about 2 months ago. his songs that he streams drops out and the people on the other end have to refresh the page in order to hear the music again.
I have also been at other peoples houses with a laptop that i also use here. Here at my house when i use the laptop and the consistency is fluctuating and all those websites that i visit take forever to load, at anothers house on the same laptop when they are running a consistency of 99 those same pages load instantly.
I hope i have done a better job of explaining myself here. I dont want anything to think it is all in my head lol. Some suddenlink techs have dang near said that to me. I have proof that this is a real issue and i do have a suddenlink supervisor of 20 years agreeing that it is a real issue but he doesnt know how to fix it yet. I am willing to run all the tests that everybody wants me too.
I would like to thank you also for helping me out on this issue.

well i uninstalled pingplotter pro and installed the standard version and right now all the numbers appear normal. nothing in red and both columns of numbers are also closely matching each other. Yesterday the numbers were in red and were very high. sometimes 20 times high than the average. Please let me know how you want me to post results or even how to do it. yesterday i just posted screenshots. i do not know if there is another way.

Verticallog = RichardM?? If so I did not realize it was you posting the screenshots.

I didn't realize you two were the same so I was asking Richard to get PingPlotter. Pro is better than standard. I'd like you to run a 1sec interval trace to a site or server (not the speedtest server) you're having the problem and post the PingPlotter image of it.

So far the only the last image you posted shows anything to be concerned about, which it shows abnormal latency with high jitter compared to the others but I need more data.

Also, post or PM your Gateway IP so I can run some traces back to you from the internet and a pingplotter of my own. Since traceroutes only show one path, it can be very helpful to see the opposite direction.

Sorry. Yea i forgot i already had an account and when i logged in with it it changed my name from richardm to verticallog. Well i have continued to do speedtests and the consistency ranges dramatically. Sometimes its 25 sometimes its 95. I reinstalled pingplotter pro and the jittering ranges from low to very high.I have seen some of my jitters to be 400. This is when i test it to suudenlink speedtest site for the trace. Today however my internet is running faster. My consistency hit 37 on suddenlink speedtest. Also has an extra i have noticed that my upload consistency is almost always 99 but my download consistency is what ranges. The signals always stay roughly the same but the consistency is not good. When i get a chance ill post some screenshots to see what you think and ill post my ip to a pm.

Here is another

here is an interesting screen shot. Now to be fair, i switched back to pingplotter when i was uploading the screenshots and thought holy moly and took a screenshot and then realized i was uploading lol.

Suddenlink has removed from their suddenlink speedtest site the consistency report. It use to tell you a list of stuff before it went to the page with 3 circles that told you how each of the categories fared. Now their is only download and upload speed and no consistency. Something is definitley going on. Right now our internet is so slow it is maddening. It makes me mad that instead of fixing the problem they are trying to hide it

You can still see those numbers on this test:

»66.76.168.20:8080/myspee ··· 64s.html

this is what i get from the link you provided. Thank you by the way!

Here is what i get from suddenlink now. Also Gib and dave marlow said they had to send it to the network engineers because they believed that the plant was fine. It wasnt till after they sent it to the engineers that this site changed.

I just got off the phone with a Diane at corporate office. The phone number was 1-314-315-3400. She did not have a problem understanding anything That i said and i think she typed everything as i was talking. She seemed really nice. now that bieng said there have been more problems here since the last time i posted. Right now we cant watch netflix or do any kind of streaming from the internet at all. the stuff just skips. anyway she is reporting it all to the vice president in this area and if they cant get it resolved then i am going to try to talk to Pete Abel.
Very odd that they would remove that section with the consistency of service. Almost like they are trying to hide that the problem is with suddenlink. I wish i coul take aound 2 full days to sit here and type everything since day one. i am a slow typer and it would take that and longer maybe, but i really am not into that amount of typing. We knew that there was problems with the internet in this area but we didnt know why. The suddenlink consistency of servce ranging from 20 to 85 told us that the problem is with suddenlink. Since they cant solve it they will probably try to hide it. I have been lied to down here jerked around and cussed out. Never once have i cussed anyone out for anything. However i have been cussed. Anyway ill come back and post things i find out from Diane. she is emailing the engineers to find out why they removed that section. The response should be interesting.

Good luck, keep us posted.