US Cable Support > Time Warner Internet Services > [TWC] TWC NYC (Manhattan) slow speeds during peak hours

[TWC] TWC NYC (Manhattan) slow speeds during peak hours

Download speed over one day (times in UTC)

Download speed over one week (times in UTC)

Check your upstream speed at the times when this occurs, just curious.

reply to blargoner
I will have to say pretty cool you were able to write a tool to automate that and build a graph with some good data there.

reply to kilrathi
I'll check the upload speed when the slowdown occurs. My tool currently doesn't support automatic upload tests, so I'll need to do it manually. Is there a reason you're curious about the upload speed?

A technician came out today and checked my line quality. He found that there was a slight signal issue at the connection point to my building, and also replaced a water damaged cable which previously fed my apartment, but he found nothing that would account for the speed pattern I am seeing. He agreed it is likely a network issue and thought that TWC might be doing work on the system during the time when I am experiencing the slowdown. He was not able to provide any evidence for this though, and claimed that technical support (even tier 3) would not know about such work either. This seems a little dubious to me, of course -- as if they'd have employees out doing work every night, slowing connections to a crawl, without notifying anyone else in the company who would be receiving complaints from customers?

The next step will be for TWC to run additional tests to try to pinpoint the issue. I am going to keep running my speed tests in the meantime.

I don't believe any customer affecting work is being carried out during prime time!

Good Luck.

Hob
--
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

reply to blargoner
You should call Level 3 as when I called them many times and now I will have to call even more when I need to find something out as time warner discontinued their network status page, most of the reps will tell you whether your area shows overload/congestion. They can look up the logs and definitely can see that information, just depends on who u encounter on your call. Reason I say to check upstream during that time is to rule out something else going on besides congestion, usually if its congestion it will not affect upstream in most cases. GL

I ran a number of upload tests, and it appears that during the slowdown the upload speed is also degraded, but not nearly as degraded as the download speed. For example, for the past 30 minutes my download speed has been ~1.5Mbps, but my upload speed has been ~2.5Mbps.

After much arguing on the phone with TWC, I got their "advanced digital services" team to begin 72 hour monitoring on the connection to try to identify the problem. (They first wanted to send a second technician out to check my equipment, but I refused.) I hope they find something...

hopefuky their solution is a nrew line

I do also only call Level 3 now. I too have problems sometimes with slow uploads usually at night but my uploads go very slow where it is 0.03 upload speed. It does not happen every night and it is only brief about ten minutes but I know it is them messing around with the lines as it is not a all day, night thing.

The Level 3 techs say it is upload noise but only when I have slow upload otherwise when I call them when it is normal they say my signal is very strong. I had techs come but they don't do anything. They just check the line to my modem with a signal meter and everything is fine. Client relations is great as they gave me credits in the past and I just got a free month of service.

reply to blargoner
Update: The advanced digital services team called me and let me know that they have escalated the issue to the engineering team, who will be looking at the network infrastructure near me (my node, etc.) to identify the source of the problem. No estimated time of resolution yet.

reply to blargoner
Utilization? Guess someone could be hogging bandwidth at odd times. Could be an issue with return signal, snr, or modem frequency. The doc 3 modem bonds to multiple freq. At once. Might look at the modem log to see the levels. Power should be +6 at highest and -5 at lowest. Signal to noise between 32 and 38. Return no higher than 54. Perfect is pwr-0, snr-36.6, ret-46. Being an apartment prob. High return, low power.

reply to blargoner
ouch thats quite extreme.

reply to blargoner
Noticed the same thing in my Manhattan connection, drops below 2 Mbps. Worse between 8 and 11pm. I am not automated but keep a spreadsheet.
It has happened before, they will send someone, check the cables etc. then magically after a few days / weeks the download speed will increase to full speed. I assume the local node is overloaded by Roku boxes and Netflix watchers and hope that they add new hardware but am not sure if they just increase the priority of people that complain. I will start the complaint process in a week or two.

reply to blargoner
Why not buy a D3 modem/gateway and save the monthly rental fee? Then you could access your modem stats and logs.

reply to snarvax
For me this is a first time thing. I noticed something off maybe 4-5 days ago, but didn't investigate until this past weekend. For me there is no time-of-day with normal service. It just started lagging. What I've determined with Broadband Speed Test is that I have fantastic download speed (often >22mbps and as high as 30mbps) but next to no upload speed (no greater than .05mbps and sometimes nothing registers at all). So I can stream content fine, but webpages and remote site admin is practically back to 56k dialup speeds. I compared my normal setup, through a DIR-655 router, with a straight-to-modem patch...same performance: great download, awful upload speeds. So I figured this is a TWC-RR issue and I came to the forum to see if others had the same problem. At first glance it seems I'm not the only one. I'm located on the East Side just below 14th Street, if that says anything to anybody? Tom

sounds like u have upstream issue or there is upstream problem on the node.

reply to blargoner
Is there anyway you'd be willing to share that program you wrote? I think I may be having a similar issue in KC and would like to have something to show the level 3 guys.

Thanks!

@Nick21 I will be getting my own gateway soon, not only to access the stats/logs but also to increase the wireless security.

@sticks435 You can download my software here: »github.com/blargoner/speedy . See the README file for usage information. You can have it log results to a local file on your computer or to an Amazon CloudWatch account.