duodec
join:2004-06-23
Palatine, IL
 ·MegaPath
| Megapath problems in Bell South land
We have three locations in Louisiana with Megapath service via Bellsouth phone lines. Service is the 1.5M/256K low end business class, and is used primarily for telnet (yes, telnet) access from two of the sites to the central location, where the main servers are located. Communications between sites is via a VPN tunnel, so secure.
We've had several separate instances where latency during the day, especially the afternoon, has gotten horrendous. Testing revealed the tunnel was not the problem, and one or the other of the remotes sites would be running fine while the other lagged terribly, so the central location wasn't implicated.
When I pinged any of the sites (firewall WAN, DSL modem LAN, DSL modem WAN, or the gateway address) from here in Illinois I'd get a steady 4-5% packet loss when lag was occurring, but even when things were smooth we saw constant 2-3% packet loss. Ditto pinging between the three sites. Packet size didn't matter; little or big we lost 4-5% in the afternoons.
I have other megapath customers (and I use it at home here in Ill Annoy) and all of them ping cleanly day or night.
So far we've had bellsouth be the cause 3 of 3 times, with an additional dsl modem failure being taken care of by Megapath. Getting Bellsouth to do _anything_ takes forever; the most recent ticket was open 29 days before they fixed a wire.
Megapath has been mixed. They are all to quick to declare the problem fixed and close the ticket when the customer doesn't ride them every day; if you get one not too bad day, Megapath bailed. I reopened the ticket several times before (I assume) I got bumped up to higher level support who actually worked things through, tested, approved the modem replacement, and got bellsouth to fix its wires. The previous problems also took weeks to drive through to getting bellsouth to fix its problems (internal tunnel issues, router issues, etc).
FYI... |
