You want to watch your power levels up and down, plus your SNR as critical
indicators. What the levels should be is described well for any docsis
network online, I mostly forget moving to DSL years ago when cocks started
charging for overuse of bandwidth. Both are stable for me, but my house
was built in '95 in Peoria, and fairly new as things go.
Cox has tools that polls your power/snr as well, monkey support probably
doesn't know or have access, but actual cable techs do, and if you pay for
business, you should get to a real tech that can see this. If it's
dropping entirely, it's probably for cable levels, ie weather, rain, or
just our extreme heat over time causes conditions such as "suck-out" of the
feeder wire in coax, the big copper wire down the middle, that eventually
expands/contracts to be too short in the path to your house. This is
entirely common in AZ, and entirely fixable if a tech isn't lazy, but this
would happen every 3-4 years for me on cox to have to roll a tech here, and
luckily I know the buttons to push to make it usually a short and sweet
call.
I mention MTR as a tool, as cox has periodically gone to hell with peering
capacity one of their monkeys didn't stay atop of, and they get saturation
out of LA more than they do in Phoenix where they hand off internet. If
you're business services, they tend to egress out Phoenix, but isn't nearly
the capacity of LA, Dallas, or other major peering points they use for
residential traffic. I can see the latency at peering points rise and tell
when they're hozed usually with packet drops at that one hop in an mtr. I
used to call my buddy that worked backbone at cox and yell at him,
typically he knew already, but confirmed and eventually fixed with
augmentation adding more 100gbps links. Lately I've seen the same in
Centurylink's network where latency goes to hell at their peering in
evenings when everyone is watching netflix, so same thing, but happens to
all the ISP's eventually these days.
-mb
On Sun, Nov 14, 2021 at 1:42 PM Joe Neglia via PLUG-discuss <
plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
> Wow, _thank you_ for that, Michael!
> You are correct, it's cable. Cox. Modem is Arris SB6183.
> I wrote a BASH script to log the outages by pinging 8.8.8.8 once per
> minute. That shows all the outages, but other than that doesn't seem to be
> of any help with troubleshooting. Your suggestion to look at the modem's
> internal pages yielded tons of info, plus it turns out the modem logs all
> the outages, too. Here's what I found regarding signal strength for the
> first few channels, upstream and downstream, when the network is up. (I'll
> grab these again the next time it goes down -- that would provide more
> useful information, I presume):
>
> *Downstream Bonded Channels*
> *Channel* *Lock Status* *Modulation* *Channel ID* *Frequency* *Power*
> *SNR* *Corrected* *Uncorrectables*
> 1 Locked QAM256 45 429000000 Hz -0.4 dBmV 38.1 dB 38 0
> 2 Locked QAM256 33 357000000 Hz 0.5 dBmV 38.5 dB 2 0
> 3 Locked QAM256 34 363000000 Hz 0.3 dBmV 38.7 dB 0 0
> 4 Locked QAM256 35 369000000 Hz 0.3 dBmV 38.7 dB 1 0
> ... there are 12 more of these Downstream channels, with similar Power and
> SNR numbers.
> *Upstream Bonded Channels*
> *Channel* *Lock Status* *US Channel Type* *Channel ID* *Symbol Rate*
> *Frequency* *Power*
> 1 Locked ATDMA 1 5120 Ksym/sec 17700000 Hz 39.7 dBmV
> 2 Locked ATDMA 2 5120 Ksym/sec 24100000 Hz 39.7 dBmV
> 3 Locked ATDMA 3 5120 Ksym/sec 30500000 Hz 39.7 dBmV
> 4 Locked ATDMA 4 5120 Ksym/sec 36900000 Hz 39.7 dBmV
>
> Seems like an SNR of 38 or 39 dB would be reasonable, but not sure what
> the standard is for these systems. Will definitely look into your mtr
> suggestion next! Always learning ... Joe
>
>
>
> On Sun, Nov 14, 2021 at 1:10 PM Michael Butash via PLUG-discuss <
> plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
>
>> Well, not knowing what you have (ie. cable/dsl vs. like actual fiber,
>> T1's, or what), I'm presuming probably cable or dsl.
>>
>> Tempe in that area was originally acquired by cox from some local podunk
>> cable company that built it originally, and circa 2003 when I worked for
>> cox, the cable was all craptastic in the asu/tempe area. A buddy that
>> works there told me they fixed most of tempe already, but one never
>> knows... DSL is highly variable on age as well, and that being an older
>> hood, I can imagine it might be shaky. Centurylink never really fixes
>> those on old 2-wire infrastructure, they just guarantee less quality.
>>
>> If you have cox and a decent motorola/arris modem, you can probably
>> monitor your own modem power levels off the modem's internal page if you
>> look up how to, which will tell you if it's truly a service problem in your
>> area or house and you can yell at them to (hopefully) fix. Calling cox and
>> drilling them some, they can see and record modem levels historically too,
>> so they know if someone there cares to look. DSL you're probably more
>> stuck with Centurylink some asscrack tech looking at a point in time, which
>> may or may not tell the whole story. Monitoring externally with pings and
>> recording latency is probably all you can do there. Run an mtr (linux
>> enhanced traceroute utility) to google over time and watch your per-hop
>> latencies, see where it goes to hell.
>>
>> Short of getting cox or CL to build fiber to your crib, you're mostly
>> stuck with cox cable or centurylink dsl for residential or *business*
>> service (which is just residential with better maintenance response times
>> to roll a tech there). They'll make you pay the construction one form or
>> another (higher monthly recurring cost over a long-term contract, or you
>> pay construction up front of some tens of thousands of dollars), but then
>> you can get 10mbps to 10gbps, again whatever you want to pay for.
>>
>> -mb
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Nov 14, 2021 at 12:34 PM Joe Neglia via PLUG-discuss <
>> plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Yes, it is an older neighborhood, but pretty much in the center of the
>>> east valley: Tempe, about a half mile south of the ASU campus.
>>>
>>> On Sun, Nov 14, 2021 at 12:20 PM Michael Butash via PLUG-discuss <
>>> plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> It would help to start with who and what service you have today, as
>>>> well as where you are roughly currently.
>>>>
>>>> Some parts of town are ancient and just get the booty end of the stick,
>>>> but mostly everywhere around phoenix is decently serviced. Fringes, it's
>>>> more selective and variable.
>>>>
>>>> -mb
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Sun, Nov 14, 2021 at 11:21 AM Joe Neglia via PLUG-discuss <
>>>> plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Any recommendations for a reliable ISP?
>>>>> ...
>>>>> Speed is not an issue. But reliability is! Any suggestions would be
>>>>> greatly appreciated.
>>>>>
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